White Backlash Against Inclusive Fiction

In 1998, Samuel R. Delaney, acclaimed Black Science Fiction writer, was asked at an awards convention about racism within the genre. Here he is referring to the writing community but I’ve observed that this can be equally applied to every industry, including movies and television:

 As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.

We are still a long way away from such statistics.

But we are certainly moving closer.

We need to be clear that what we’ve been experiencing very strongly for the last six or seven years is a white social media backlash against women and PoC representation in popular media. As marginalized people are seen more often in media projects what we’ve also been seeing is a white, straight, backlash against their slightly more positive/nuanced depictions.

What Delaney means is that more racism will be expressed by those white people who feel most threatened by Black progress in that industry, and I can say this because this has been noted in every industry in which it has occurred.

This is not new! It hasn’t been new in over a hundred years.

What we’re seeing today in the pushback against Black actors in visual media has happened multiple times and in every industry, from music, to literature, to politics, to movies, and television. Every time PoC have made inroads into any field of endeavor there has been a white backlash against it. The only thing that changes are the industries in question, and their arguments against that progress. Now we see it happening in visual entertainment.

In the 1920s, Jazz was seen as barbaric and immoral. It was considered the kind of music that lead white women astray and put them in environments where Black musicians had access to them. All manner of immorality was attributed to Jazz including drug use, violence, and hypersexuality. The exact same criticisms were made against Rock in the 50s, Disco in the 70s, and Rap music in the 90s, when those gained ascendances in popular culture. Rock music was a genre that championed drugs and sex, Disco encouraged homosexuality, and Rap music was considered too violent for white sensibilities.

https://ew.com/tv/candice-patton-wanted-to-leave-the-flash-racist-misogynistic-fans/

The same backlash that we’ve been seeing for the last six or seven years against Black actors in the Fantasy genre is the same backlash we experienced when N. K. Jemison won back-to-back Hugo awards in 2016, 2017, and 2018 for her Fantasy trilogy The Obsidian Gate. As Delaney predicted, a select group of white male critics complained that women and PoC were getting too many awards, and so formed a contingent of fans and authors called “The Rabid Puppies” in an attempt to game the Hugo awards rules to win awards for themselves. In other words, they preferred to cheat, rather than accept that Science Fiction fans were a diverse group of men and women who had moved on from the type of Science Fiction they wrote, which centered on white European men as the heroes. Much of the hoopla in the industry has since calmed down, but that does not mean that parity has been reached for authors of color, and we have seen the exact same dynamic play out in other arenas where women and PoC have made any kind of inroads, including politics, where white men have decided that rather than share political power, they would prefer to game the system to keep it all of it for themselves.

In 2014, Candace Patton was cast as the Black love interest of Barry Allen in The Flash television series on the CW network. That same year, Disney released The Force Awakens, the first film in its latest Star Wars trilogy, and the lead character was a Black actor named John Boyega. They both experienced immediate backlash for daring to perform the fictional roles that they had been hired for. Candace Patton has received unending racist vitriol on social media for the last 10 years for playing the Black love interest of the lead white character solely because her character was a white woman in the comic books. And don’t make the mistake of thinking the only toxic fans are white men. White women established themselves firmly in the contingent for bigotry by weaponizing fandom against Candace and harassing and bullying John Boyega on social media.

https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/a-timeline-of-leslie-joness-horrific-online-abuse.html

In 2016, a new version of The Ghostbusters was released with an all-female cast and received immediate pushback from gatekeeping white male fans who believed they owned that franchise and argued that women couldn’t be fictional Ghostbusters. The movie starred three white actresses, but it is very telling that the onus of their hatred landed squarely on the only Black cast member in the group, Leslie Jones, who was driven from social media by the racist backlash against her original characters’ very existence. So we can see that even arguments that PoC and women make their own original characters rather than supplant characters who used to be white are simply a smokescreen for racist abuse. Original characters do exist and receive the same level of acting out and foolery that race and gender-swapped characters do, as we saw with the release of Black Panther.

In 2018, there was a massive backlash against the release of Disney’s tentpole superhero movie, The Black Panther, in which the same gatekeeping white male fans attempted to downvote the movie’s ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, causing Disney and RT to temporarily shut down the audience portion of the site to prevent the abuse. Thinkpieces were written denigrating the making of the film, and some fans engaged in violence callouts, falsely reporting that they had been harassed and/or beaten by racist Black Panther fans in order to sully the reputation of the film. Black fans had to be vigilant in protecting the actors from harassment on social media and debunking the claims of violence.

Every time Disney releases a film that isn’t centered on the heroic activities of straight white men there is a backlash from white men against those films, against the actors, and even against the fans who talk about them. Women and fans of color aren’t even safe in their own fan spaces as those will, at some point, be invaded by trolls and bigots spewing racist vitriol at them for daring to like a movie they were the audience for. We saw this with Captain Marvel in 2019, and Shang Chi and The Eternals in 2021, with each successive film being criticized as the worst film ever made in a franchise, how the MCU is failing, and the blogs, videos, and websites of fans of color being reported as abuse, and blocked on TikTok and Youtube for daring to discuss entertainment that is aimed at them as the audience.

This also happens with television shows. Since it is Disney that is leading the charge of diversity and inclusion in its many franchises, it is Disney’s fans and employees (the actors) who have borne the brunt of the backlash, during and after series like Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ms. Marvel, and the newest series, She-Hulk. Why? Because the stars of these series are women and PoC. It is notable that there was no backlash against series with white male leads like Loki, Hawkeye, and Moon Knight which were also released in the last year.

These shows are not alone in having a racist fan problem. Since John Boyega’s debut as one of the first Black Stormtroopers in Star Wars, there has been a racist and misogynist backlash against every single advance of a PoC, or woman, in that franchise, especially in any film in which a white male wasn’t the star, but even a few that were, as with the last TV release, Obi Wan Kenobi, which prominently starred a woman of color. The lead villain of the series, Reva Sevander, is played by Yale graduate Moses Ingram. She had to endure toxic fans who called her everything but a child of god, questioned her undeniable qualifications for playing her role, and was flatly told by some of them that she could not be a part of Star Wars.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/02/1102509719/star-wars-obi-wan-kenobi-moses-ingram-racist-messages-disney

In the past year, we have seen a racist backlash against casting PoC in any SciFi and Fantasy film or television series. The casting of Leah Jeffries as Annabeth Chase in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians TV series, the casting of Black Hobbits, Dwarves, and Elves in Amazon’s Rings of Power series, the casting of Halle Bailey in Disney’s live-action version of The Little Mermaid, and the casting of Black legacy characters in the Game of Thrones spinoff series, House of the Dragon, has racist/toxic fans pulling out all the stops to troll, harass, and make sure that Black fans, actors, and creators are aware that they don’t belong in genre films and series.

You also have those bad faith actors who try to hide their bigotries behind legitimate concerns, like questioning the credentials of the actors who were chosen, not understanding that when the only time you care about whether or not a character is qualified to perform the role they’ve been hired for is when they are a woman, or gay, or a person of color, that that too is performing a racism.

The Whiteness of the Past, the Present, and the Future

White people for the last hundred years of film and TV have crafted entire fictional universes with pasts, presents, and futures that were entirely centered around themselves, with not a single face of color to be seen. When I was a little girl, I was sitting in our kitchen watching some futuristic movie and turned to ask my mother why there were no Black people in the future. Really quick she said, “Maybe we left.” She’d noticed it too and seemed to have that answer ready for me, just in case.

White people who are making the arguments that we don’t belong are speaking from a long history of whitewashing, of never having seen Black and Brown faces in historical epics, present-day dramas, or futuristic landscapes unless we were playing happy slaves, silent victims, or menacing drug dealers. The industry was so whitewashed that when it eventually developed the use of color, Black and Brown people weren’t even a consideration, and color was only attuned to white skin tones. Movies and TV were so white that Black women didn’t have hair and makeup people of their own until a scant few years ago.

According to white people making the loudest noise, we don’t belong anywhere in their all-white fantasylands of the past or the future. Their entire understanding of historical events comes not from study, or reading, or actual knowledge, but from Hollywood movies in which our presence had been, downplayed, erased, or ignored, even in our own stories. Based on these deeply ignorant people’s understanding of history, the only stories in which Black people should be allowed to appear are the ones based on slavery, as if enslavement was our only contribution to the world. We’re not allowed to appear in movies set in the present unless we’re being killed or killing, and apparently, we don’t exist at all in the future, not just physically, but in any cultural or social contributions we made to the making of this country thast sre simply never referenced.

Candace Patton talked about how she didn’t have anyone to do her hair, and Black actresses called out Hollywood in 2020, for its lack of hairstylers for them. Many of them confessed to having to do their own makeup because white makeup professionals never bothered to learn how to do Black skin or hair. White hairstylists didn’t need to know that to have successful careers! There was such a complete lack of Black female stuntwomen that white stuntwomen wore blackface on the rare occasions that Black actresses needed stuntwork done! This was pretty rare indeed because up until about ten years ago we never got to be in Action movies often enough to need stunt doubles!

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/07/238957/black-hairstylist-diversity-issue-hollywood-2019

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/black-stuntwomen-ready-fight-hollywood-130058128.html

All of the white backlash against Black women (in particular) participation in genre media we are seeing today is just one part of the side effects of Hollywood’s insistence that there is only one demographic that needs to be pandered to, (therefore all the other demographics can be ignored), and the idea that movies with diverse and inclusive casts don’t make any money, (which results in the erasure of PoC in order for anything to be greenlit). Many films cannot receive funding to get made without a big enough named actor in the cast. Unfortunately, Hollywood not casting PoC in certain films and for certain roles results in actors of color (in particular Asian American actors) finding it nearly impossible to become big enough named actors to ever get projects funded. They can’t get to A-list status if they are never given the opportunity to do so.

Not being considered for roles in certain genres of film limits an actor’s career prospects, and when those roles are obtained (as with Candace Patton’s casting as Iris West in The Flash, Moses Ingram’s casting in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, and Leslie Jones casting in Ghostbusters) they receive no protection from their employers from the harassment and pervasive racist vitriol on social media, which is one of the nastier side effects of Hollywood never having hired actors who look like them for these roles in the past. Part of their employment means they are subject to public emotional abuse while working in a role they were paid money to perform. These actors often receive little to no support from their white industry colleagues or white female fans either (something which has only begun to change just this year!) It has continually fallen on the fans, especially Black women, to be their support systems under trying and stressful circumstances.

Until this moment passes, and seeing PoC in these types of roles becomes normalized, and white fans fully begin to understand that this is not a situation that is going to change (because diversity and inclusion is proving to be a very lucrative deal for the corporations engaging in it), we will continue to see this kind of toxic behavior, and we all need to be ready for that. Much of this behavior can be laid at the feet, not just of the kinds of fans who are used to being the only demographic that was pandered to for over a hundred years, but Hollywood’s idea that PoC, neither the actors nor the audiences, were worthy of consideration.

It is long past time Hollywood realized we too are worthy of being pandered to and that representation always mattered, not just to us but to white people who are unused to seeing PoC as anything other than the stereotypes which Hollywood has always given them.

As I stated when I first started this blog:

Black women like to have adventures too.

It is a shame I’ve had to wait nearly my entire life for Hollywood to realize women like me exist.

Starring the Landscape: The Desert Has No Memory

In 1971, Universal Pictures released Duel, a film starring Dennis Weaver, and directed by, a not yet famous, Stephen Spielberg, from a story by Richard Matheson. In it, a businessman named, conveniently, David Mann, is pursued across the desert by a monstrous truck and the driver who insists on terrorizing him. Mann, who thinks himself a practical, but tough fellow, has to prove his masculinity, not just against the driver of the truck that menaces him for over half the movie, but against his aging vehicle, and the Mojave desert in which this drama unfolds.

The hot, barren, landscape of the desert has often been used as a backdrop to tell stories of dramatic survival, proving one’s toughness, or realizing one’s humanity. Sometimes its about surviving the people in it, as everyone competes for the bare resources that can be found there. Unlike snowy environments, the desert’s wide-open terrain, with so few obstructions, is perfect for car chases, and creating a feeling of low grade anxiety, the sense that one could get lost in such isolation. The heat heightens a person’s fear, and desperation, creating a unique form of sweaty misery. The desert is for isolationists, the place people go when they want to separate themselves from other people, or to prove their rugged individualism, or in some cases, simply go mad.

In the Western storytelling tradition, the protagonist is the person who is trying to move forward, to progress, to accomplish a goal. The antagonist is whatever that person must struggle against to reach said goal. Through that process, the person undergoes change and/or growth. The desert is an environment that can often be filmed with a single protagonist, as in 2010’s 127 Hours, as a young hiker literally struggles against the environment that has trapped him, or as in the Mad Max franchise, a cast of thousands, and still get variations on these basic messages, because it’s the desert that is the ultimate antagonist.

The desert tests the worthy, and this is nowhere better illustrated than in the Mad Max franchise, where human beings manage to scrounge a precarious living, several years after a global catastrophe. In Fury Road, when Max is captured by Immortan Joe’s Warboys, they treat him not as a person, but as a commodity, an object. Throughout the movie, while fighting Immortan Joe, his men, and the dry terrain in which their battle takes place, Max grows and changes, reasserting his humanity and proving to others that he is not a thing.

The desert is home to the poor and isolated, with its lonely trailer parks, ghost towns, and abandoned and ramshackle houses. It’s a place where people go to get away from other human beings. Most Horror movies set in the desert, like those set in rural America, tend to focus on people as monsters, rather than creatures.

The kind of people who live in the desert are often equated with its predators, as they stalk, kill and feed on anyone they regard as intruders into their domain. They are sometimes mutated, and feral, as in the 1977 Wes Craven movie, The Hills Have Eyes, where a vacationing suburban family run afoul of a pack of cannibals who scrounge a living in the Nevada desert by eating those who pass through it. The movie pits family against family, as the Carters attempt to hold onto their humanity while fighting the inhumanity of the cannibals. And in 1987’s Near Dark, a family of vampires preys on desert wanderers, or the occasional lonely farmboy, who just happens to run afoul of the wrong girl of his dreams.

The desert is vast and unforgiving, and its silence and isolation gives birth to much quieter horrors than trucks and cannibals, as all kinds of rotten secrets hide there, as in the 1975 movie, The Devil’s Rain, which stars William Shatner, as he tries to stop the leader of a Satanic cult from retrieving an artifact of great power. In the 2005 film, Wolf Creek, a young woman must try to survive the landscape, and the serial killer she and her family encounter while camping in the Australian outback, and in the 2017 Netflix movie, Cargo, a father is suffering from a zombie bite, while stranded in the outback, and must try to get his baby to safety before he succumbs to his wounds.

Desert wanderers are not always victims or innocents, and any people one finds wandering in the desert are best left to themselves, as the 1986 movie, The Hitcher, shows. When Jim Halsey picks up a hitchhiker in the Nevada desert, he finds he has picked up a serial killer who terrorizes him for the rest of the movie. It seems the desert is as great a place to be stalked and hunted as the jungle, since that is the plot of several desert set films, from 1995’s Nature of the Beast, which stars Lance Henriksen, to the 2001 Joy Ride, starring Paul Walker, where a group of teenagers is stalked by yet another truck driver across the arid landscape.

Its best not to live in small towns situated in or near the desert, as they tend to attract monsters of all kinds including large and small desert dwelling insects. In the vast openness of the desert, creatures tend to grow in size to match, often aided by nuclear radiation. In the movie Them! from 1954, giant ants terrorize a desert town, after they are mutated by nuclear testing. A year later, another town experiences a giant spider invasion, caused by nuclear testing, in the 1955 movie Tarantula. Nuclear testing isn’t the only culprit for villainous desert bugs as they sometimes get mutated by chemical waste, such as in the 2002 horror comedy, Eight Legged Freaks, where the tiny town of Prosperity, Arizona gets attacked by the titular monsters, after a truckful of chemical waste, and a local spider farm, collide.

The smaller versions of these desert animals sometimes like to get in on the action, too, as in the 1977, Kingdom of the Spiders, starring William Shatner again, when tarantulas take their revenge against a small Arizona town that burned down one of their habitats. In the 1974 Phase IV, ants in the Arizona desert plan to take over the world, and make humans a part of their new hive mind, after a mysterious comet imbues them with greater intelligence.

Sometimes other kinds of monsters come from under the ground, as the residents of a small Nevada town discover when an earthquake releases mutated cockroaches, that have the ability to start fires, and being eaten alive was something the residents of the tiny town of Perfection did not foresee after they are attacked by a pack of massive tunnel dwelling worms, that they name Grabboids. The townsfolk have to demonstrate just how self sufficient, and clever, they can be against an underground menace that can appear anywhere, and without warning, all while trying to escape across the barren landscape, to find safety in the next town.

In fact, the desert’s isolation ensures that all kinds of weirdnesses can be born there, and reach a certain level of maturity before they’re even discovered. The strangest thing to come out of the desert to prey on mankind is the sentient tire named Robert, from the 2010 Horror Comedy, Rubber. Robert rolls through the desert landscape telekinetically exploding any humans he encounters, while a choir of onlookers give commentary.

Despite the wealth of material in this post however, movies set in the desert aren’t that frequent. It’s a difficult landscape in which to shoot a film. The temperatures and sand can work against any filmmakers so making anything in such a place is a real feat, but there are a few filmmakers who feel that the sere dry heat and isolation of the desert is worth it. The desert landscape, just like it’s snowy cousin, the tundra, is the type of landscape that is great for showing human survival at the extremes.

What I Said: Tumblr Edition

This is just a compilation of some of the posts I made for my Tumblr account. I post very different things there, than I do here, but sometimes I post some things which overlap. These are just some thoughts that occurred to me in the past couple of weeks, and I wrote them down really quick, because although my thoughts about things are consistent, I sometimes forget what I wanted to actually say, and how to say it.

On Narrative Conditioning

As usual, I have this habit of watching events that happen in the rest of the world through the lens of the films I’ve watched, because the analogy just hits me, not because I can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality. It’s just how my mind connects things to other things. Nothing that happens in stories is new, and I see fiction as a reflection and reinforcement of things and thinking that happens in the real world. On some deep level, white people do understand that certain things are wrong, because they keep making fiction (often fantasies) about it.

I think fictional narratives are important, even today, because so much of what we all believe about other human beings does not come from direct experience. A lot of what we believe comes from popular and mainstream media, which is primarily owned by straight, white, men, and it is their thinking about the rest of humanity that gets prioritized. The images of black people that white men put out in the world, for decades, not just in fictional narratives, but in news stories and opinion pieces online, all of it, essentially teaches the rest of the world that our lives are unimportant, and teaches us to hate ourselves. Everyone (yes, PoC, and me, too) are inundated with the idea that whiteness is the default, and takes priority. Some of us overcome this constant messaging by critically challenging these narratives. Some people don’t.

For example, as I grew up, I was inundated with the idea that I was ugly because I was black. Not because I was ever told I was ugly. And not because people told me that white was prettier, but because the words “beautiful” and “pretty”, were never associated with women who looked like me. Those words were used everywhere, in tv ads, and shows, and movie after movie, to only refer to thin, middle-class, white women. (For a good example of this, count how many times Uma Thurman’s character is referred to as beautiful in the Kill Bill movies, and how none of the other female characters looks are ever mentioned. Those women do not have to be called ugly for us to get the message. She just has to constantly be referred to as pretty, while their looks are ignored.) Now imagine a steady diet of this from childhood onward. No one is calling you ugly, but you get the message loud and clear, that pretty doesn’t mean you. This is what is meant by passive conditioning. All of us have this conditioning, and most of this conditioning is done through mainstream media, like books, movies, tv shows, and music.

 

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On Not Thinking

lkeke35

One of the things I’ve observed about trump supporters is that many of them seem to be every bit as incoherent in their mental faculties as trump is. These are not people who have ever had clear, and consistent thoughts, in the sense that one idea follows the next, but instead, seem to have a collection of specific talking points, that are attached to whatever issue sparks their outrage.

These are not ideas that are part of a coherent schema, and most of these thoughts are separate and unattached to one another. It’s one of the reasons so many of them gravitate to raving anger when asked deeper questions about whatever it was they just said. If you ask one of them how sheltering in place is like slavery, to elaborate on that, then they’ll simply produce a string of more talking points, at the mention of the word slavery. They are simply parroting what theyve been told to think, when a specific word is mentioned, and it’s also the reason that while they are consistent from one person to the next, they are internally inconsistent with the individual.

This, I think, is why none of their thoughts make logical sense, to the rest of us, who do have a consistent life philosophy. We form our philosophy over time and then fit circumstances, events, life experiences, and people, into that philosophy. (I’m not speaking about Evangelicals because they’re a special case of nasty, so this doesn’t fit them.) I could be wrong about this but the bottom line is that non-trump supporters are generally pretty coherent and consistent in their thinking in a way that his deepest supporters are not.

Many of trumps supporters didn’t logic there way into the statements we hear them make, and so cannot be logicked out of any of those ideas. These are things they have been told to say, and believe, when a subject is mentioned, even if there is no consistency between the answers. They literally do not see the inconsistencies because they have been conditioned not to think critically, not to ask questions, while the rest of us have. I don’t think they believe sheltering in place is like slavery. That’s simply the thought that’s been attached to their frustration at being inconvenienced, even if that specific thought contradicts another thought they might have if you bring up slavery (It wasn’t real, black people need to get over it, I didn’t own slaves, etc.)

 

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I wrote this one when I was feeling particularly salty, about some dumb shit, I saw on Tumblr.

On Speaking Out

lkeke35

So as soon as some shit pop off, you got white people coming out from under the floorboards, (honestly, these people are like cockroaches, they only come out when our lives are at their darkest), with their traditional hot takes about black violence. What do these people do? Lie in wait for an opportunity to tell black people how they should respond to white wtf*ery? Yes! That’s exactly what they do.

 Some people are so shameless, they will take any and every opportunity to express their anti-blackness. They’re completely oblivious to injustices that aren’t happening to them, but when hands get thrown, they finally notice that, and manage to work up enough energy to care…but only about the response….like those teachers who only saw when you got fed up with being bullied, and finally kicked some ass!

 If they didn’t have shit to say about a single Black person’s death, at the hands of vigilantes and extrajudicial killers, (or worse yet, didn’t even notice that shit was happening), they don’t get a say in how black people respond to the violence that was done to them, especially the kind of violence that could have been thwarted, if they’d paid closer attention to what was happening ,and done something.

Offering their shitty hot take, on what black people need to be doing right now, is very possibly some of the most mentally lazy, and easiest bullshit they can pull right now!

 

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On the Optics

lkeke35

One of the reasons you keep hearing about how George Floyd’s death was the worst one yet, is because of the way in which it was caught on film. In movies, this is called “framing”, and unfortunately, this framing accounts for at least some of the responses we’ve seen from people, who previously, were capable of ignoring most of the deaths of unarmed black people. With almost all the other deaths of black people we’ve seen captured onscreen, most of them, even while seen up close, didn’t allow us to look into the victims eyes,and follow that person down into death, while it happened, and for a lot of people (especially the ones who hadn’t been paying close attention) that shit was deeply traumatic!

 With the Floyd imagery, there is a visceral component to it,that even the worst of these types of videos lacked. As viewers we sat there, and watched his face, and heard his last words, and looked into his eyes for as long as it took to kill him, and that had an effect on people that the other videos didn’t.

Even in other videos we didn’t see the victims faces up close. The videos were from a distance, or the victims were seen from behind, or it happened so fast it almost didn’t register for some people. Just like in a movie, the way the image is framed has a lot to do with the level of emotional engagement with the subject. The closer the camera is to the people being filmed, the higher the level of emotional engagement with that image.

In closeup, in broad daylight, one man is being killed, while the person that does it, looks completely indifferent to what he’s doing.

 Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these are like movies, but this is how a lot of our minds have been conditioned, through decades of movies and television, to think and/or feel about death. If it’s not up close and personal to the viewer, then the emotional engagement, (certainly for a lot of non-black people), just isn’t there. They didn’t really SEE it, or FEEL it. But this time, they were standing right there, watching his face, hearing his last breath, watching the life being strangled from him ,and knowing it was real.

They watched the face of his killer, and could see the lack of humanity, of empathy, of care, in his expressionless face. In such imagery, there is a level of complicity that’s absent from mostof the other videos ,where you didn’t see the perpetrators face, or the victims expressions. This felt different because it looked different.

 

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On All Cops Are Bastards

lkeke35

I have an even simpler explanation for those not understanding. You got a bowl of skittles. Every one in ten skittle is actually a cyanide tablet, and you cannot tell the difference between it, and any of the other skittles.

 

Would you eat from that bowl? Would you grab a handful and chow down, knowing that in a bowl of 100 skittles, ten of them will kill you?

 

No. You’d throw the whole damn bowl out. The whole damn bowl is bad.

 

We cannot tell, just by looking at them, which cops are going to kill us, and which ones won’t.

 

All cops are bad, because it is the system that is bad.

 

The correct phrase is: One bad apple spoils the whole bunch.

 

If one cop is bad, and the others don’t work to eject him, that makes them all bad!

 

You throw the whole damn group out!

 

“What does it mean when people say that all cops are bastards (ACAB)?”

If it were an individual thing, you’d give them the benefit of the doubt, but it isn’t; it’s an institutional thing. the job itself is a bastard, therefore by carrying out the job, they are bastards. To take it to an extreme: there were no good members of the gestapo because there was no way to carry out the directives of the gestapo and to be a good person. it is the same with the american police state. Police do not exist to protect and serve, according to the US supreme court itself, but to dominate, control, and terrorize in order to maintain the interests of state and capital.

Who are the good cops then? The ones who either quit or are fired for refusing to do the job.

While the following list focuses on the US as a model police state, ALL cops in ALL countries are derivative from very similar violent traditions of modern policing, rooted in old totalitarian regimes, genocides, and slavery, if not the mere maintenance of authoritarian power structures through terrorism.

• police shoot people twice as often as previously thought. Keep in mind that this was self-reported, so we have no way of knowing if these numbers speak to the actual number of shootings in the US. Many of these people are completely unarmed. Police kill far, far more people than terrorists in the US and have killed over a hundred people more than mass shooters did in 2019 that we are aware of. Mass shooters are easily tracked. Police killings are not. 1 2
• Oh, and cops also killed more people in 2019 than school shooters did in all of US history.
• And if they don’t shoot you, they might just airstrike your block and burn your children alive.
• They also shoot one dog every hour, every day. At the absolute least.
• Once you’re in jail, be prepared to sit there for weeks -or months or years. It’s so bad that people constantly plead guilty just so they can get out. It’s so bad and so common, in fact, that over a third of all exonerations come after an individual has pleaded guilty. So much for the right to a speedy trial, huh?
• And getting arrested is easy – tens of thousands of people yearly, in fact, thanks to lowest bidder garbage that police departments use in order to test for illicit substances. Field drug tests are about as reliable as lie detector tests or horoscopes. They just don’t work. They just don’t.
• Think you’re safe if you just follow directions? Yeah, no. And if they don’t just outright kill you, they could make their instructions so arcane and hard to follow that they’ll kill you for not following them, and they’ll usually get away with it. He got away with it, by the way. Surprise!
• They’ll prosecute you for even knowing about crimes cops have committed.
• Think you’re safe in your home? lmao nah. Not even your 7 year old is safe from getting her brains blown out. check out this horrifying megapost on no-knock raids
• Being a taxi driver is literally more dangerous than being a cop.
• cops are more of a danger to themselves than anyone else is to them
• they’ve admitted to stealing as much -or recently more– than burglars through “asset forfeiture,” and the rate of their thefts has been climbing yearly. Keep in mind, these numbers only articulate what’s been reported. It’s probable that they’ve stolen far more than just this.
• police are literally allowed to rape people on the job in 35 states, as they have the power to determine whether or not you consented to sex with them while in their custody.
• up to 50% of the people police murder are disabled
• the police are being trained to kill as if they’re an occupying army and we’re an insurgency. this is an inevitability, as the military-industrial complex needs to keep expanding into new markets.
• Eugenics was still alive and well in the prison-industrial complex up until very recently, and could very well be continuing for all we know, as it was forcibly sterilizing inmates as late as 2010. I honestly don’t see a reason to believe it’s stopped.
• The US surveillance state is massive (and while this post primarily focuses on the US, other countries are just as bad), though much of our surveillance is privatized. This doesn’t stop the police from partnering with private companies, however. This will only get worse as time goes on. Also, we can’t forget about the Patriot Act and Snowden’s PRISM leaks.
• the police, as an institution, are so completely steeped in violence, that up to 40% of them commit acts of domestic violence and other forms of domestic abuse. Most citizens are not even allowed to own firearms if found guilty of domestic violence, and these guys are expected to handle military-grade equipment.
• Police exist to control and terrorize us, not serve and protect us. That’s only their function if you happen to be rich and powerful.

also this: lol

the police as they are now haven’t even existed for 200 years as an institution, and the modern police force was founded to control crowds and catch slaves, not to “serve and protect” – unless you mean serving and protecting what people call “the 1%.” They have a long history of controlling the working class by intimidating, harassing, assaulting, and even murdering strikers during labor disputes. This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

The justice system also loves to intimidate and outright assassinate civil rights leaders.

The police do not serve justice. The police serve the ruling classes, whether or not they themselves are aware of it. They make our communities far more dangerous places to live, but there are alternatives to the modern police state. There is a better way.

Further Reading:

(all links are to free versions of the texts found online – many curated from this source)

white nationalists court and infiltrate a significant number of Sheriff’s departments nationwide

Kropotkin and a quick history of policing

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. (2013). Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense.

Rose City Copwatch. (2008). Alternatives to Police.

Williams, Kristian. (2011). “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing.” Interface 3(1).

Williams, Kristian. (2004). Our Enemies in Blue: Police and power in America. New York: Soft Skull Press.

–

Source: Watch large group of officers protecting George Floyd’s killer (reddit user american_apartheid)

Source: second-degree-education

 

 

 ***************************

On Trump’s Photo Op

lkeke35

I am a movie lover, and I especially love horror movies written by Stephen King. I grew up watching horror movies. In fact, I think my mother and I (I blame her for my sordid addiction to horror films) tried to watch every one that got made between 1982, and 1989, before I went off to college.

 One of the movies that always stuck with me, on a moral and political level, was Stephen Kings The Dead Zone. Christopher Walken plays a man named Johnny, who gets psychic powers after a car accident. After he gets these powers, he meets a union delegate named Greg Stillson, played by Martin Sheen, and has a vision of the future, where Stillson, as president, starts a nuclear war. Haunted by this image, Johnny decides to assassinate Stillson during his campaign for president. He doesn’t succeed in killing Stillson, but he does change the future.

 During Johnny’s assassination attempt, Stillson, while standing at a podium, grabs a little girl (who happens to be the daughter of Johnny’s ex-girlfriend) and is photographed using the child’s body as a shield. It effectively ends his campaign and he never becomes president.

 Movies often use the trope of a person’s willingness to harm the innocent to protect themselves, as a way to show how corrupt, ruthless, or just sheer evil they are.The other day, Trump, who has a life long record of shitty behavior it would take too long to get into here, used police brutality against a crowd of peaceful protestors (against police brutality,) and Australian journalists, to clear them away from a photo op he wanted to take at the church in Lafayette Park, which is across the street from the WH. Every moment of the brutality was caught on film.

 George Floyd may have been the death heard round the world, but this is different. The footage from this was seen and heard around the world too, only this time, Trump was directly involved, and in doing so, has created an international incident that has received global censure. We have reached the point where government officials, of other countries, are openly trolling and just blatantly disrespecting the president, and his staff, on social media. Any kind of moral standing we ever had in the world, as a nation, has been entirely spent. Even the rest of the world are utterly sick and tired of this man, and are feeling free to express their contempt for American imperialism.

 There have been a lot of times, we’ve watched his actions and thought, “This is it, this is the last time he can do something like that. His term is now over.” But it never happened. This may actually be Trumps Baby Shield moment. At any rate, with every terrible decision he makes during this crisis, he insures the demise of his career.

I certainly hope so.

But, I’ve been wrong about that before, huh?

 

Just as his supporters mistake cruelty for honesty and bluster for courage, Trump has mistaken bloodlust for leadership. The bombast hides the fundamental truth that the president is a coward, so crippled by the fear of appearing weak that he screams for blood from the safety of his darkened White House, emerging only to gas peaceful protesters and clergymen in an attempt to look strong. He is incapable of understanding how further brutality fuels the unrest he has proved incompetent at confronting.

Adam Serwer: A Nation Without Law, Order, or Justice 

 

Weekend Introvert Reading

I’ve noticed that the topic of Introversion is one of my most popular topics on this blog. Well, here are the links to all the posts on Introversion, most especially being Black and an Introvert. 

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2018/08/07/black-male-intj/

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2017/07/11/intj-the-mastermind/

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2016/12/03/how-to-spot-the-intj-female-intj-bytes/

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2016/11/29/black-female-intj/

http://personalityjunkie.com/07/infj-infp-intj-intp-types-modern-life-part-2/

https://writingsofsm.wordpress.com/2017/11/01/the-intj-female/

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2016/12/08/introvert-linkage/

Being Black and and introvert comes with its own set of rules and/or difficulties, like the idea that Black people cannot be introverted at all:

https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/hesaid-black-male-and-introverted/

https://afropunk.com/2016/11/confessions-of-a-black-introvert-yes-were-black-enough/

https://www.quietrev.com/introverted-black-girl/

http://www.curlynikki.com/2017/09/what-it-means-to-be-black-female.html

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/confessions-self-proclaimed-black

Black and Introverted: 5 Tips To Attract Women – Quietly

The Struggle of Being an Introverted Black Girl

 

 

There’s also a couple of newbie links too:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-real-reason-introverts-dread-small-talk_n_56854922e4b06fa688823798

Why introverts feel like outsiders

How To Understand an Introvert You’re in a Relationship With

https://www.fastcompany.com/90331732/these-are-the-myths-about-introverts-and-extroverts

Why Is Socializing Exhausting for Introverts? Here’s the Science

 

And from Medium.com:

The Life of the Black Introvert

Making Space

Dec 18, 2014

 

 

The Dilemma of The Quiet Black Girl

Nena Malikah

Jul 15, 2018

How to train your extrovert, the essential guide for introverts

The modern introvert’s essential guide to navigating people who think out loud, invite you to weekend parties, and interrupt your leisure reading just when it’s getting good.

Marc Cenedella

Mar 18, 2016

Random Conversations on Tumblr

 Just some of the conversations I’ve been reading, and sometimes participating in, on Tumblr. Incidentally, you should check out my Tumblr page. It’s a bit different from this one, in that I post more about politics, and social issues, along with more casual things like goofy animals, and silly discussions.

Robots and Race

* The TV Series Humans has just finished its third season, and quite a number of fans are unhappy. I watched the second season and noticed that race wasn’t much talked about, although since many of the robots featured depict different races, it should have.

The star character for some of the major plotlines was Gemma Chan’s, Mia. She was killed in the season finale, and fans felt some type of way about that. I didn’t watch the third season because I had gotten bored with the show.

But something in EAWS’s essay, about how Mia was treated on the show, and the third season’s approach to racial issues, prompted thoughts from me about how the subject of racism is depicted in science fiction/fantasy shows, especially when the writers are White. I’ve noticed that they are often not honest about White culpability in the invention of modern racism.

I’ve been noticing this trend, and I had some things to say about.

eastasiansonwesternscreen

 

Humans is one of those shows that is racially diverse on the surface, but in reality is very safe, very white-centric (yes, even with having Mia and Max in the main cast).

“Äkta människor”, the original Swedish show had its own problems with writing the characters of color,  but it was always very clear that the in-universe “Real Humans” (”We are People”) movement was a direct parallel to the white supremacist, anti-immigrant alt right groups / political parties, and all their members were portrayed by the white actors.

Humans, however, while also pretending to be a sci fi allegory of real life racism and xenophobia, makes sure that for each bigoted white character there’s always a Bigoted Character of Color. Just a few examples –

• a random Black man, a member of alt-right “We Are People” movement, in s1 holding an anti-synth banner and shouting anti-synth propaganda;
• Thusitha Jayasundera’s Neha in s2 was leading a case against Niska, yes, she went through massive character development in s3, and became an active synth rights supporter, but in her own words, she changed her views mainly because of Laura (a white woman);
• a xenophobic anti-synth cameo character played by Naoko Mori in s2;
• Ed’s bigoted Black friend, who persuaded Ed to sell Mia (which in turn made it easier for the writers to redeem Ed in s3 – “Ed wasn’t a racist who dehumanized his girlfriend of color, he was just a weak man, who followed an advice from his Black friend, it’s the Black friend, who is the /real/ racist” – that’s the writers’ message here);
• a Black woman police officer, who profiled Mia in s3;
• a random Angry Black Woman on the street, that attacked Mia in s3;
• a Brown Muslim politician on the Synth commission, that was presented more anti-synth, than a white guy, who lead the commission (s3);
• an anti-synth Brown Head of the Police, member of the commission;
• an unnamed Black man leading the human supremacist group against the synth compound, targeting Max and Mia (3×08).

Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, third time is a pattern, as they say.

  Keep reading

lkeke35

What was the point in changing what was basically a white nationalist into a Black xenophobe? Intersectional bigotry exists, yes. But white writers of Äkta människor managed to show intersectional bigotry through white characters – they had xenophobic white gay character and a homophobic white hubot/synth, they even had a weeb. Brown writers of Cleverman showed intersectional bigotry through Koen (in s1) and Waruu West in s2. But when white writers prefer to show Black and Brown characters as the “real” racists (like Sense8) the only reason for that is that the writers don’t want to touch the subject of white supremacy because it makes them uncomfortable. *

I love this, and I just want to piggyback a little bit off this post for a minute:

This is one of the major reasons why I dislike racism allegories written by White writers. They often, and very deliberately, get these allegories wrong by trying to equate racism and white nationalism, with “reverse racism” (which is not a thing, btw). They often do this by casting PoC as virulent racists against whatever out-group is the stand-in for a marginalized group in the narrative, whether its robots, supernatural creatures, or aliens.

I’ve seen this happen in a lot of fantasy, and sci-fi narratives written by White writers, who are attempting to lecture their audience on how bad racism is, all while trying never to acknowledge the elephant in the room: That our current model of racism, they are riffing on, was invented by White people.

They often make these virulently racist characters Black as well. In Heroes, the nasty racist, who wanted to kill all heroes, was a Black woman, who actually killed children. In District 9, the African characters were racist against the aliens, monetarily prostituting them, exploiting them, and even cannibalizing them, (which is a whole other nastily racist trope about people from the African continent, that I simply cannot believe no one caught.) In the X-Men/New Mutants TV Series, The Gifted, you have a Black man, as a member of the government, hunting down the mutants, to put them in concentration camps, and in Teen Wolf, you have a Black woman who wants to destroy all supernatural creatures, and yet again, advocates killing children to accomplish her goal.

It’s even worse when sometimes these are the only Black characters in the entire narrative, or worse yet, Black women.

There is already a dearth of Black women in fantasy and sci-fi media, so Black women being cast in these roles (of killing children) is an especially nasty trope, that needs to fucking die, especially when you consider that it is real life Black women, who know, above all else, what it is like to lose their children to violence, and are working hard right now to protect their children from things like gang violence and police brutality. Real life Black women work damn hard to counter the very narratives these characters are advocating in these shows. To then cast these (always dark-skinned, with natural hair, because its simply not enough that they be Black) women as the advocates and killers of children, in these shows, is an especially insulting slap in the face to Black fans, as Black women are some of the hardest fighters against racism and sexism, being so often on the receiving end of both, and to keep seeing them cast in these roles is more than a little enraging.

I know the point the writers are trying to make is that there’s racism on all sides and that anybody can be racist, but that message is more than a little self-serving, especially when you consider that it is only White writers who tout this message, in their allegories about bigotry. So, not only are they appropriating our stories of oppression (all things that have been done by Whites to everyone else) to use for non-human beings, but casting PoC in these roles as the oppressors, because they want to express the idea that that type of racism and bigotry is an equal opportunity position. By doing that, they thereby remove themselves from collusion with the issue and relieve their own guilt.

 

Source: eastasiansonwesternscreen

@@

*And then there’s this problem, which is seen in every scifi/ fantasy racial allegory from True Blood, to Zootopia, to Bladerunner, to Bright, to The X-Men……… 

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-cringe-worthy-way-sci-fi-fantasy-deal-with-prejudice/

Yet it’s the kind of parable that turns up over and over again in science fiction and fantasy stories that are reportedly trying to convey a message of tolerance. “Look, we get that you’re having trouble seeing minorities as humans, so perhaps it would help if you imagined them as something that is A) objectively not human and B) inherently dangerous.”…

…What makes it worse — and weirder — is that writers can’t resist giving these marginalized groups some kind of superpowers, which in turn actually gives the fictional society a legitimate reason to fear them.

@@

 

@@

Science Fiction Genre and Race

 *White writers also have a tendency to be lacking when it comes to imagining futuristic depictions of race, often simply reproducing the same racial issues (and many of the same stereotypes) that exist right now. The situations of various PoC simply never changed. We’re still sassy sidekicks, living in poverty, model minorities, or just erased.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/welcome-to-the-post-racial-future-its-still-pretty-racist

Altered Carbon presents a world that looks post-racial, and in which humanity has escaped from identity, and identity politics, once and for all. But even when bodies are interchangeable commodities, certain bodies are treated as having more value than others. for the greater profit of rich people and white people, and especially of rich white people.

 

http://colorwebmag.com/2018/03/27/the-racial-flaws-of-blade-runner-2049/

I’m surprised a film of this magnitude and of this scale decided to show one of the most regressive and most racially-charged images I’d seen in a while; replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), the replicant assistant to Niander Wallace (Jared Leto)  is shown getting her nails electronically altered by a small Asian man, whose hunched over, deep in his work.

The stereotype of the Asian nail salon tech has made its way into the future.

 

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/-em-star-wars-em-and-the-4-ways-science-fiction-handles-race/359507/

 Sci-fi likes to believe it can imagine anything, but, especially in its mainstream incarnations, it’s clearly a lot more comfortable imagining race in contexts where the topic is dealt with obliquely or simply not mentioned or foregrounded. In this area, Hollywood adventures are strikingly timid. 

 

@@

Black Feminism

*Discussion of Black women as love interests. By saying that Thor is only interested in Valkyrie, as a heroic figure, it  is akin to saying she’s a strong, independent, Black woman, who don’t need no man, and how this does not take into account intersectional femininity:

The Problem with Valkyrie Being Simply a “Hero” to Thor

So…I get not everyone is going to understand this, especially if someone is not a Black woman and doesn’t have our experiences, so I’m going to try to lay this out as nicely as possible and try not to come off too harsh.

I’m going to start off with a quote from Alice Walker:

“Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly indentifies one’s status in society, ‘the mule of the world,’ because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else–everyone else–refused to carry. We have also been called ‘Matriarchs,’ ‘Superwomen,’ and ‘Mean and Evil Bitches.’ Not to mention ‘Castraters’ and ‘Sapphire’s Mama.’“

You see, Black women are expected to be the “hero” of someone else’s story. We’re expected to be “the help.” The “mystical hero.” The “sassy friend.” We’re always there to help out the lead, but we’re never the love interest.

Chris Hemsworth has said himself that Thor is “smitten” by Valkyrie…when you disregard that and say she’s simply his hero and that it’s refreshing that he’s not admiring her in a romantic way, you are confusing your experience as a non-Black woman with ours.

Black women have historically been masculinized and fetishized. We’re either seen as too unattractive for love or too sexual to be romanticized. So, when we are put on a pedestal as a hero, it’s not at all refreshing. It’s the same ol’ same ol’. Now, being adored and loved? That’s something Black women never get to see for themselves.

It’s something that has slowly been changing, but the more it changes, the more pushback is given in response. CW’s Iris West is nitpicked as a character for the silliest things while the fandom constantly ships Barry with Caitlin, a white character who has shown no interest in him or vice versa. Even the actress cannot escape the anger from fans who prefer the lead be paired with a white woman. She faces constant harassment on her social media on a regular basis.

So, while it might be revolutionary for white female leads and other non-Black female leads to be looked at like heroes rather than love interests, it’s not so much for Black women. So rarely are we given the message that we too can be worthy of love. Please tread carefully when you suggest that a Black woman being seen as a man’s hero rather than love interest is “refreshing.”

 

@@

Humorous Interlude

 

 

*The discussion, on the adoption and care of the Roomba, continues: 

 gaymilesedgeworth

after i move i really wanna get a used roomba

 

gaymilesedgeworth

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

just remember they’re social animals and should always be kept in pairs, don’t get a roomba if you aren’t prepared for that responsibility

 

fireheartedkaratepup

That’s a common misconception. Roombas do perfectly fine on their own if you spend quality time with them! They group together in the wild for protection, but when they have no natural predators in the area they often choose to live alone.

 

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

i didn’t know that! do you have any advice on roomba breeding and the problem with parent roombas’ tendency towards eating their young?

 

ironbite4

……..I’m nuking this entire hell planet from orbit.

 

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

even the roombas?

 

ironbite4

The roombas are coming with me.  Can’t let them stay with you crazy people.

 

Source: gaymilesedgeworth

 

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Representation

*I loved this speech about the importance of representation and inclusion:

Rick Riordan won a Stonewall for 2017

rosetintmyworld84

 

Rick Riordan was awarded the Stonewall Book Award for his second Magnus Chase book, due to the inclusion of the character Alex Fierro who is gender fluid. This was the speech he gave, and it really distills why I love this author and his works so much, and why I will always recommend his works to anyone and everyone.

“Thank you for inviting me here today. As I told the Stonewall Award Committee, this is an honor both humbling and unexpected.

So, what is an old cis straight white male doing up here? Where did I get the nerve to write Alex Fierro, a transgender, gender fluid child of Loki in The Hammer of Thor, and why should I get cookies for that?

These are all fair and valid questions, which I have been asking myself a lot.

I think, to support young LGBTQ readers, the most important thing publishing can do is to publish and promote more stories by LGBTQ authors, authentic experiences by authentic voices. We have to keep pushing for this. The Stonewall committee’s work is a critical part of that effort. I can only accept the Stonewall Award in the sense that I accept a call to action – firstly, to do more myself to read and promote books by LGBTQ authors.

But also, it’s a call to do better in my own writing. As one of my genderqueer readers told me recently, “Hey, thanks for Alex. You didn’t do a terrible job!” I thought: Yes! Not doing a terrible job was my goal!

As important as it is to offer authentic voices and empower authors and role models from within LGBTQ community, it’s is also important that LGBTQ kids see themselves reflected and valued in the larger world of mass media, including my books. I know this because my non-heteronormative readers tell me so. They actively lobby to see characters like themselves in my books. They like the universe I’ve created. They want to be part of it. They deserve that opportunity. It’s important that I, as a mainstream author, say, “I see you. You matter. Your life experience may not be like mine, but it is no less valid and no less real. I will do whatever I can to understand and accurately include you in my stories, in my world. I will not erase you.”

People all over the political spectrum often ask me, “Why can’t you just stay silent on these issues? Just don’t include LGBTQ material and everybody will be happy.” This assumes that silence is the natural neutral position. But silence is not neutral. It’s an active choice. Silence is great when you are listening. Silence is not so great when you are using it to ignore or exclude.

But that’s all macro, ‘big picture’ stuff. Yes, I think the principles are important. Yes, in the abstract, I feel an obligation to write the world as I see it: beautiful because of its variations. Where I can’t draw on personal experience, I listen, I read a lot – in particular I want to credit Beyond Magenta and Gender Outlaws for helping me understand more about the perspective of my character Alex Fierro – and I trust that much of the human experience is universal. You can’t go too far wrong if you use empathy as your lens. But the reason I wrote Alex Fierro, or Nico di Angelo, or any of my characters, is much more personal.

I was a teacher for many years, in public and private school, California and Texas. During those years, I taught all kinds of kids. I want them all to know that I see them. They matter. I write characters to honor my students, and to make up for what I wished I could have done for them in the classroom.

I think about my former student Adrian (a pseudonym), back in the 90s in San Francisco. Adrian used the pronouns he and him, so I will call him that, but I suspect Adrian might have had more freedom and more options as to how he self-identified in school were he growing up today. His peers, his teachers, his family all understood that Adrian was female, despite his birth designation. Since kindergarten, he had self-selected to be among the girls – socially, athletically, academically. He was one of our girls. And although he got support and acceptance at the school, I don’t know that I helped him as much as I could, or that I tried to understand his needs and his journey. At that time in my life, I didn’t have the experience, the vocabulary, or frankly the emotional capacity to have that conversation. When we broke into social skills groups, for instance, boys apart from girls, he came into my group with the boys, I think because he felt it was required, but I feel like I missed the opportunity to sit with him and ask him what he wanted. And to assure him it was okay, whichever choice he made. I learned more from Adrian than I taught him. Twenty years later, Alex Fierro is for Adrian.

I think about Jane (pseudonym), another one of my students who was a straight cis-female with two fantastic moms. Again, for LGBTQ families, San Francisco was a pretty good place to live in the 90s, but as we know, prejudice has no geographical border. You cannot build a wall high enough to keep it out. I know Jane got flack about her family. I did what I could to support her, but I don’t think I did enough. I remember the day Jane’s drama class was happening in my classroom. The teacher was new – our first African American male teacher, which we were all really excited about – and this was only his third week. I was sitting at my desk, grading papers, while the teacher did a free association exercise. One of his examples was ‘fruit – gay.’ I think he did it because he thought it would be funny to middle schoolers. After the class, I asked to see the teacher one on one. I asked him to be aware of what he was saying and how that might be hurtful. I know. Me, a white guy, lecturing this Black teacher about hurtful words. He got defensive and quit because he said he could not promise to not use that language again. At the time, I felt like I needed to do something, to stand up especially for Jane and her family. But did I make things better handling it as I did? I think I missed an opportunity to open a dialogue about how different people experience hurtful labels. Emmie and Josephine and their daughter Georgina, the family I introduced in The Dark Prophecy, are for Jane.

I think about Amy, and Mark, and Nicholas … All former students who have come out as gay since I taught them in middle school. All have gone on to have successful careers and happy families. When I taught them, I knew they were different. Their struggles were greater, their perspectives more divergent than some of my other students. I tried to provide a safe space for them, to model respect, but in retrospect, I don’t think I supported them as well as I could have, or reached out as much as they might have needed. I was too busy preparing lessons on Shakespeare or adjectives, and not focusing enough on my students’ emotional health. Adjectives were a lot easier for me to reconcile than feelings. Would they have felt comfortable coming out earlier than college or high school if they had found more support in middle school? Would they have wanted to? I don’t know. But I don’t think they felt it was a safe option, which leaves me thinking that I did not do enough for them at that critical middle school time. I do not want any kid to feel alone, invisible, misunderstood. Nico di Angelo is for Amy, and Mark and Nicholas.

I am trying to do more. Percy Jackson started as a way to empower kids, in particular, my son, who had learning differences. As my platform grew, I felt obliged to use it to empower all kids who are struggling through middle school for whatever reason. I don’t always do enough. I don’t always get it right. Good intentions are wonderful things, but at the end of a manuscript, the text has to stand on its own. What I meant ceases to matter. Kids just see what I wrote. But I have to keep trying. My kids are counting on me.

So thank you, above all, to my former students who taught me. Alex Fierro is for you.

To you, I pledge myself to do better – to apologize when I screw up, to learn from my mistakes, to be there for LGBTQ youth and make sure they know that in my books, they are included. They matter. I am going to stop talking now, but I promise you I won’t stop listening.”

 

@@

Dinosaurs

*This entire review is basically the only reason people got to see these films. We’re certainly not watching them for the people in them.

Now, I’ve told you guys how much my Mom loves movies about people being eaten by things, so if she says something was a bad movie, take what she says as the truth. This woman will watch almost anything with giant creatures chasing and eating people, and she hated this movie!

I’m probably one of the few people that didn’t actually hate this movie, although I hated most of the people in it, and spent some amount of time rooting for my three favorite dinosaurs: the T-Rex(which I have named Sue), the velociraptor named Blue, and the mosasaur from the last movie, which I have, henceforth, named Molly.

https://allthefilmsiveseenforfree.tumblr.com/post/175238468895/jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom

 

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The Apocalypse

*I had to leave a response to this because the whole idea of the zombie apocalypse has now become nothing more than power a fantasy for White men, who all imagine they’re gonna be Negan, from The Walking Dead. 

I’m not watching any more shows, or reading any more zombie apocalypse novels, with White men in the center of the story. Most zombie novels and movies only feature White, middle-class people, and focus on their reactions to the loss of electricity, I guess.  Despite the existence of most of the world’s infrastructure, and the clear examples of what human beings would actually do when encountering catastrophe, in places like Puerto Rico and  Katrina, apparently one’s immediate reaction is to run amok in the streets, trying to kill each other for food.

I’m ready for some stories featuring unconventional heroes, in diverse environments. This is why I enjoyed World War Z (the book). How does the zombie apocalypse affect the plains of Africa or the mountains of Tibet? The slums of India? Or the favelas of Brazil?

Its also interesting to note that none of the pop culture we know, exists in any of these universe created by the zombie apocalypse. It’s always a surprise to the inhabitants of these stories as if they’d never heard of zombies. They always have to start from scratch. What if we just didn’t? I want to read a story (or watch a show) where all the Black, and Latinx people, in the ‘hood,  lived, because we’ve all been watching movies about the zombie apocalypse for decades, and we know all the rules and the tropes.

why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?

jumpingjacktrash

 

something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.

if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.

i am not a scientist or an engineer, i’m just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.

radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustion’s trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years you’re going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.

what i’m saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing ‘little house on the prairie’ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because that’s going to be a lot of people’s main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.

nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what i’m saying. let’s stop writing the No Tech World scenario.

 

lkeke35

As a corollary to the above:

I’ve been saying this about the Zombie apocalypse for years. What city dwellers do you know are gonna immediately drop everything, run out to the woods, and live at a subsistence level, just because dead people are walking around? People with disabilities, allergies, or elderly parents to care for, ain’t going to be doing any such thing. Why is the advice given to people, that they need a “bug out” plan just because the dead are walking? I’m not buying it.

I live in the hood. Do you know how many handymen we have in the hood? How many military personnel? Or even homebody engineers? Do you have any clue how resourceful and cooperative poor people are, and have to be, to survive even with electricity? And how many of us have been trained to expect the best, but plan for the worst case scenario. No, you don’t, because that idea of poverty is never represented in popular culture. Shit! A zombie apocalypse won’t even ruffle our fucking hair. We’ll come up with ways to kill the zombies while keeping it moving. Hell, my brother, all by himself, could have the electricity up and running, a defensive tower, a moat, schooling, and gardening, all in the space of two weeks, and entirely organized by my mother.

It’s also interesting to me that all zombie apocalypse narratives only seem to consist of middle-class, white, suburbanites trying to survive, with a handful of PoC thrown in like confetti. The most that White writers can imagine, for PoC, even during the apocalypse, is that we all die? Really! That seems to be their only scenario. They don’t take into account that poor Black people have been taking care of each other since the invention of poor people. The poor have never believed in an isolationist, go it alone, ruggedly individual attitude, when it comes to surviving, because we couldn’t afford that! That’s the kind of attitude that only people, with all of their basic needs met, could adopt as a life strategy. Poor people are not lazy, and of everyone, they would be the most likely to survive the apocalypse, because we have experience with surviving hardship and insecurity!

On the other hand, the middle-class white guys who invent these types of stories are obsessed with that attitude. They really think that as soon as the electricity stops, people are gonna lose their gotdamn minds, and start trying to kill their neighbors for fun and food, or planning a long journey to go find their wife, son, daughter, lost somewhere in the pre-tech Badlands! Not even taking into account that we have real-life scenarios right here, right now, that we can look at and figure out that most people aren’t gonna act like that. (*cough, ahem! Puerto Rico! Cough*).

I have long come to understand that apocalypse scenario are just wish fulfillment fantasies for middle-class white guys who think that the end of the world will make them the heroes they always wanted to be. As a result, I’m no longer interested in apocalypse scenarios with white men in the center of them as the heroes, and yes, I’m also talking about a certain TV show, too.

 

Source: jumpingjacktrash

Actually, I’ve noticed one staple of almost all apocalyptic fiction written by White people: In everything, from those Purge movies, to alien invasion, and zombie apocalypse movies, the White Western reaction seems to be “go out and kill each other”.

I’m mostly talking about the Purge films, where the premise is that all crime is free for 12 or 24 hours, but all people can think of to do is kill each other. Are you kidding me? Can we get an Oceans 11 version of The Purge, where someone has been planning the perfect heist, all year long? Actually,  I hate the Purge movies because the movies create more questions than they answer, and my super-villain brain keeps trying to organize the cultural, social, and legal implications of such an arrangement.

In a lot of American apocalyptic fiction, we never get any idea how the rest of the world is handling the destruction of the “civilized” world, or even if the rest of the world is experiencing it at all. For all we know, it’s only the Americans and Europeans who have lost their damn minds, and the Canadians are doing just fine! How do we know the Aussies haven’t just all gone punchy from the heat,  put on some fetish gear,  and decide to ride around in the desert?

When White men write about the apocalypse, they often seem to write about destroying whatever, and whoever is left.  Now contrast all that with how Women and PoC write about the apocalypse:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-cole/people-of-color-do-surviv_b_5126206.html

https://www.indiewire.com/2016/03/women-and-poc-survive-the-apocalypse-march-2016s-vod-and-web-series-picks-202649/

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Fandom

*Advice on how to NOT be a shitty fanfiction writer:

There IS such a thing as a bad premise. A story that relies on accepting racism, sexism, homophobia etc as valid or justifiable or not something that needs to be contested, like any story that can not exist or function as is if you take those elements out…is a fundamentally bad fucking premise.

Nobody questions the existence of good ideas. Why do some people fight so damn hard to deny that there is such a thing as a bad idea?

Every idea a person has ever had does not NEED to be put out there. Not every idea leads somewhere good.

And each and everyone of us is capable of evaluating whether an idea we have is good or not. If it’ll do harm or not. We each have the capacity to look at an idea we have and say…yeah that’s not really workable. And just….not share it.

This isn’t an imposition. This isn’t censorship. This is basic human awareness of the fact that ideas in our brain impact us and us alone. Ideas we make the choice to enact in the world in some fashion impact others as well as us.

So fucking many of you resort to crying censorship when all that’s being asked of you is applying some scrutiny to what ideas you decide to share, because you can’t seem to wrap your heads around the idea that someone else telling you what you can and can’t write isn’t the only conclusion to be made from conversations about creative responsibility.

Because you just can’t seem to fathom the concept that you could just decide for yourself…oh, huh, I don’t actually HAVE to do this thing I’m digging my heels in about. It’s not a binary equation. It’s not either I do this or I do nothing at all and I might as well just have no rights or freedoms whatsoever gawd.

It’s almost like it’s actually….hmmm when examining the endless array of possibilities that go into crafting ideas and honing them and all the variables that act as search filters to narrow down my selection process of what areas to focus on, what elements to include….what if ‘hey is this idea one that appropriates shit that’s outside my lane or perpetuates harmful and toxic tropes’ was just an added search filter used in that process?

 

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 Post-lude

moami

if you find bones in the forest, sit a bit and listen. they are old and have some good stories to tell. maybe they’ll teach you a spell or two, or explain where the water on our planet came from.

if you find bones by the ocean, run. don’t look back. run, faster, faster. the sea may love you but there are nights where she knows neither mercy nor science, and the bones warn you only once.

deseng

boi if you find bones call the police i hate this website so much

moami

this is a piece of creative writing, in case you couldn’t tell from the fact that real bones don’t usually go hey lil’ mama lemme whisper bony secrets in your ear or warn you of the incoming tides like a calcified weather frog.

Source: moami

Captain America Civil War Meta

One of the reasons I like Tumblr so much is that its much easier to find in depth analysis of some of my favorite movies and characters, that go well beyond your typical, glossy movie reviews. In fact, Tumblr is almost famous for this.

*I do actually like Tony despite my criticism of this character. I sympathize with Tony and his efforts to try to do good, and understand he’s gone through a lot of trauma he’s simply not dealing with very well. But at the same time, I also acknowledge that this does not excuse Tony’s fuckups. I like Tony because in the Iron Man movies he is willing to acknowledge when he’s messed up and apologize for his mistakes. That’s not the problem. The problem is that he goes on to make all new, horrible mistakes.

starkassembled

a piece about Tony Stark’s mental state throughout the MCU [spoilers below cut]

Tony Stark, of the original team, is the only civilian after Bruce. But there are some key differences between he and Bruce. Bruce is treated delicately by the team after he comes back from the Hulk. They give him his space, let him listen to his chill out remix. They let him come down in his own time. I also think that Bruce has demonstrated that he has a solid handle on himself. He grapples with a huge amount of guilt (and anger), but he’s never demonstrated any signs of trauma. He’s upset by some of the destruction he causes, but he’s found a balance, probably in his own research into ways to calm himself and balance his anger, that’s helped him be able to live with himself without snapping.

Tony Stark doesn’t have that. Tony is a civilian, with no proper training other than the training he’s put himself through in order to operate the suit. Sure, he was a military weapons contractor most of his life, he’s been around military most of his life, but he’s never seen violence and combat like he has since the kidnapping.

Tony’s also demonstrated that he really has no healthy way to handle his guilt, his pain. He bottles things up and he shoves them to the side to deal with later. Except he doesn’t want to deal with it later. So he tinkers and he builds and with each subsequent betrayal of his trust throughout his film appearances, it only serves to increase his paranoia, increase his anxiety, make his survivor’s guilt that much deeper.

Tony has slowly been losing his mind since his kidnapping in IM1. He’s nearly killed in a bombing by one of his own stolen weapons. He’s held hostage by a terror cell, he’s learning that his weapons that he built to protect his country are somehow ending up in the hands of terrorists and murderers. So when he goes home, he immediately shuts down his weapons manufacturing and starts building a way to get his weapons out of those hands.

He learns that his father figure of the last 30 years has betrayed him, is trying to take over his company, has been selling his weapons to terrorists all this time and tried to have him killed.

He’s grappling with the guilt and the weight of the lives and livelihoods destroyed by his stolen weapons that he can never make amends for. And then he’s dying, he tries to give his life away to his friends while pushing them away to spare them any pain his inevitable death may cause.

And then months later he’s flying through a wormhole, his suit goes dead and all he can do is watch as a nuke tears apart the Chitauri fleet before his eyes as his exit gets smaller and smaller. He could die here. Die floating out in the silence and dark expanse of space. He won’t get a burial. He won’t be laid to rest beside his mother.

But he manages to fall out at the last moment, but every night he’s back there, back in space, unsure if the blast will reach him before he chokes to death.

He has no time for any therapy, because the world always needs saving. He continues to work, his PTSD and survivor’s guilt gets worse and worse, eating away at him. He builds himself an army of armors to try and keep himself and his friends safe.

*(Technically, he does have time for therapy, as the final scene of The Avengers shows. He just refuses to get any more, and chooses the wrong therapist.)

He tries to give it up for Pepper, because it’s what Pepper wants and he’d do anything for her. But he can’t give it up, not when there are innocent lives at risk. So he makes new suits. He makes the Iron Legion. He’s trying to find a way to protect the world while being able to retire. To get some rest. To find some peace. Hopefully to get some therapy. But that time never comes because in all his paranoid efforts to build peace, he builds destruction instead. Ultron tries to end the world and the team stops him, but at the cost of a country. At the cost of thousands of lives. And he tries to do his best to save as many people as he could, but it’s too much.

Keep reading

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*Bucky was born in a different era nd under very different circumstances than Tony, but still, contrast Bucky’s methods of coping with the trauma of the things he’s done, with Tony’s methods.

“But I Did It”- Guilt in Captain America: Civil War

I came away from Civil War really struck by how overwhelming the theme of guilt was. It motivates people to do selfless things, it motivates people to do selfish things, and it’s the driving force behind the ultimate showdown between Bucky and Tony. What the movie does though is contrast the fashion people deal with their guilt.

Tony and Bucky are both people consumed by guilt. In both cases it’s guilt over things they ultimately had no control over. Tony couldn’t have predicted that his parents would die with so many things left unsaid between them and him, yet when we first see him he’s reliving that moment over and over. Tony is steeped in even more guilt when his actions in creating Ultron are thrown back in his face by a victim’s mother. He’s even guilty that his teammates hold him responsible for their containment. The crux of the issue is that Tony just can’t let it go. He’s willing to stare his flaws in the face, but he’s unwilling to forgive himself for those flaws, which leads to an issue I’ll get to in a second. Tony is stuck in an endless guilt loop. His attempts to fix things always seem to lead to more issues that lead to more guilt. He’s understandably frustrated because he’s just so driven to try to make things RIGHT that he’s willing to clash hard and often with people who don’t agree with his ideas. Ultimately the government might be right that the Avengers should have some limitations put on them, but Tony is so desperate to try to fix or at least ease his mind over what he feels like he’s responsible for that he makes agreements and does things without looking at every angle. He flogs himself over his mistakes, but he can’t even really articulate the real problem: acceptance that sometimes things happen no matter what and you’re going to have to live with them.

*Now contrast that  with what Steve says to Wanda after the incident in Africa. These are exactly  Steve’s words to her.

It’s Bucky who actually voices what is Tony’s issue as well as his. As Steve tries to tell his friend that it was Hydra’s fault and that “it wasn’t really you doing those things” during his assassin days, Bucky calmly and quietly looks up and says “but I did it”. It doesn’t matter to Bucky who MADE him do it. It doesn’t matter to him that he was just the weapon. What matters to him is that he did it. He has to live with that. He has to see something he caused happen in his mind over and over again. He ultimately takes responsibility, and in doing that he echoes something Steve says earlier about being willing to shoulder the blame over things that go wrong. What Steve doesn’t address is not just being willing to bear the consequences of mistakes, but being willing to move forward from there.

That’s the real issue. Not whose fault it ultimately is, but the fact that both Tony and Bucky, in their minds, DID IT. They have to live with that. They have to live with something that no amount of reassurance from outsiders can fix. All the love and understanding in the world can’t help someone who won’t move out of the guilt cycle. And in the end that’s why Tony, in spite of knowing Bucky had no control over his actions in killing the Starks, attempts to kill him. I think it would be easy to claim Tony is motivated purely by revenge, but I think it’s more than that. Tony of anyone should be able to understand someone causing something horrible inadvertently. He’s been in Bucky’s place. He’s caused damage without really knowing it. He KNOWS Bucky was programmed, even calls him the “Manchurian Candidate” at one point proving he completely believes Bucky had no control over his actions. Part of the reason Tony can’t accept Bucky’s moral innocence in what he did is because he can’t accept his own. Tony can’t consider forgiving Bucky because he can’t forgive himself. Tony’s generally a reasonable person, but he’s willing to flat out murder Bucky in the end even though he’s aware Bucky was just the weapon that HYDRA used to kill his parents. Bucky didn’t have a choice in the matter, Tony knows that, but he violently tries to hold him responsible in the same way he mentally holds himself. “Do you even remember them” he lashes out at Bucky, sure that the person involved in causing the determining factor in his life can’t understand the magnitude of what he’s done. Can’t understand the weight of feeling responsible for some many lives. He unwittingly echoes the woman who cornered him in the elevator earlier in the movie. He’s suddenly in her place reacting the exact same way.

“I remember them all.”

That line, right there. If Tony had been able to pause in his rage and grief for a second he would have realized that out of ANYONE he’s come across, Bucky gets it the best. Tony lives with all the ghosts of what he’s caused. So does Bucky. Bucky voices what Tony can’t. No matter what people tell you, you are still going to feel guilty that you did something no matter the reason and every incident can still be fresh and painful and seared on your memory whether it really deserves to be there or not. Maybe you had false information, maybe you didn’t have control, but it still happened. You still did it. You’re still going to have to live with it. And if you don’t forgive yourself to some degree you’re not really going to function. You can see Bucky trying to figure out how to live with himself. He can at least voice that he’s not sure he’s worth it, voice his uncertainty. You see him cringing at the scythe of destruction he is (ie. “what did I do”). You see him figuring out how to live with guilt without needing to punish himself.

Tony says the problem without really saying it. “And then, and then, and then”. The cycle over and over and over. He pushes people away because of it. He tortures himself because of it. And it will eat him alive until he is able to step forward.

*Throughout all of the films we witness three different methods of dealing with trauma, Steve’s way, Bucky’s, and Tony’s. Of the three, Steve and Bucky deal with their trauma in a more healthy manner. Steve’s method is to confront what he’s done head on, process it, and deal with the emotions from it. Bucky’s method is to mentally and physically withdraw. After he gets his mind back, his first impulse is  to retire from the field of play. After the main plot is over, his instinct is to, once again, completely withdraw. Not hunt down Hydra or get revenge. And Tony chooses to not deal with it at all, to shove it aside.

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*This entire meta is an echo of the post I wrote about Tony’s motivations earlier. (https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2016/07/19/on-the-right-captain-america-and-iron-man/)

Tony was definitely a villain in the comic books, during Civil War, and frankly, he didn’t come across looking too good in this movie, either.

jbananabarnes

I got words.

See that curb party Steve and Bucky were giving Tony at the end of the trailer actually made me feel really bad for him, and that’s interesting. Because while there is something pitiable about Tony in the MCU, the Tony I’m familiar with from the comics, is not. And certainly not during Civil War. In the comics Tony was objectively wrong during Civil War. His methods of getting what he wanted during that run were unforgivable.

But the Tony we’ve been working with in the MCU is decidedly less in love with himself. His egotism is largely for show, because we’ve seen him have panic attacks and display acts of poor self care. But the line about also being Steve’s friend seemed really out of place to me. Because they have never really been friendly. They’ve been civil and work on the same superhero team but for Age of Ultron’s part it was them fighting with each each other over how to handle their problem. So I can’t help but think a lot of this comes from if its because of Tony’s genuine lack of self confidence says he puts a lot of stock into what Steve thinks of him. The MCU has made Tony into someone whowants to do good, but doesn’t actually have the tools to enact that good or have a real understanding of what good is in the real world with it’s moral complexities. It’s not that his intentions aren’t genuine, but this kind of altruism isn’t in his nature. He understands the world in a very binary way. Something is good, or it’s bad. A lack of awareness of grey areas makes it difficult for him to make the best judgement when put in a “hero” position. When he does good there is a lotof collateral damage. And maybe he needs Steve, this kind of universally accepted pillar of good, to agree that what he does and his actions are good so he can justify himself to himself. Because Tony’s solutions to difficult problems, historically, have been “kill myself’ which doesn’t indicate that he’s got a whole lot of self worth, or someone who thinks the only means of being heroic is through a self sacrificing Hail Mary. In all of the Iron Man films and both Avengers films, I’ve never felt as though being a hero was something Tony felt comfortable falling into, there’s always been a certain uncertainty.

But, in turn, I don’t think Steve’s ever thought highly of Tony, I think he’s been surprised by Tony but goes into most interactions with him ready to be annoyed or disappointed. And Tony’s never had like, real friends. Rhodey (and arguably Pepper, and even Bruce being a friend of circumstance) being a singular exception. And now he’s got this Avengers crew who’s actually got his back, it probably never occurred to him that Steve’s got baggage too. He probably doesn’t see Steve as a real person, but as this mythological figure because he grew up while Steve was solidly frozen. Steve’s always been propaganda to him, something his father – who he grew up resentful of – spoke highly of. Steve’s probably never been a real person to him. He’s never treated him like one. I can imagine Tony would hugely misinterpret “tolerance” for “friendship” especially from someone he hasn’t bothered to actually know as a human being.

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radialarch

so i’ve seen quite a bit of doylist discussion about the steve-tony relationship and how marvel is trying to use a long comics history as shorthand in the mcu, but i keep thinking about it from a watsonian point of view. and here’s the thing: tony stark is not very good at friends.

tony is self-centered, antagonistic, and sarcastically belligerent on the best of days (and i say this with great affection); he is not an easy person to be friends with. tony knows this. and tony has, i think, decided very early on that he doesn’t care to sand down his rough edges for the sake of friends. it’s very possible that his first friend in the world was edwin jarvis – and that says a lot, that the people tony grows close to are, by and large, in some ways obligated not to leave him.

because that’s what tony does to people: he is intensely tony at them until they leave. and if they don’t, then maybe – maybe that means they love him. this is the tony stark model of friendship. it’s not a very healthy model, granted, but no one’s ever accused tony stark of being well-adjusted.

and then there’s steve.

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nthnystrk

some civil war (mostly tony) thoughts

ok so i’ve just come out of my fifth viewing of civil war and clearly i have many Feelings about the movie, but i have many Words about tony stark in this movie, so help me god.

Keep reading

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*And now some Bucky meta. For some 7o + years Bucky has had everyone inside his head but himself. Finally he’s free of outside influences, and his first instinct is to withdraw from the world and live off the grid. He just wants to be left the hell alone, and in relative peace. Contrast that with Steve’s method of coping with what’s happened to him, which is keep fighting, until he finds a reason to live.

twinagonies

and now BUCKY

god bucky is so sad in this film. but i wanna get to how we get to that first credits scene, and why i love it even though it hurts like a motherfucker.

so what’s he been doing since we last saw him in a museum? living in the saddest apartment in bucharest, eating plums, trying not to murder anybody. literally the saddest possible goal.

beyond the exchange of a dispassionate bucky saying “yeah, that’s a good strategy for taking me in,” the most telling moment for me is when steve assures him, “this wasn’t your fault, you had no choice.”

and he says, “but I still did it.”

bucky is not steve–he doesn’t hold choice and agency and decision as the paramount ideal of freedom. i’m not sure that bucky feels guilt, or anything like it. he feels fear and resignation. it’s that moment when zemo starts the lists of trigger words, and he knows what’s happening, and he rips apart his cell trying to stop it from happening. all he wants is to be left alone. and maybe, to forget.

“i still did it,” to me, is the revelation of the horror he’s lived through, and the horror that continues to be his life. he wants it to stop. his worst nightmare comes true: he’s found, he’s unmade, he’s forced to be the killer he tries desperately not to be, and he’s left with the pieces.

for a film that’s all about choice and consequence, about responsibility and accountability, bucky stands as the character who serves as the consequence of other people’s culpability. in many ways, he’s tony’s opposite: he bears guilt for things he never chose to do, while tony pushes the guilt for his myriad sins onto everyone around him, never taking responsibility for the havoc he creates.

and the guilt and horror is too much. bucky argues at the end, as he’s going back into cryofreeze, that this is so he won’t be used as a weapon. I think this is true, but also there’s the hidden motivation: that bucky doesn’t really want to BE anymore. he wants to turn off his consciousness and fall asleep and never wake up until the danger isn’t there anymore.

because you have to think of bucky in romania, waking up in that sad apartment, and thinking, “is this it? is this the day they find me?”

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*This person perfectly lays out why I am and remain Team Cap. Its not because I dislike Tony but because Team Tony had some serous flaws in their reasoning and actions.

narniangirl1994

Powerful Moments in Civil War

After seeing Civil War, I’d like to discuss what I believe were some of the most powerful and pivotal moments in the movie. Don’t read this if you haven’t seen the movie yet:

Keep reading

*Of note in this particular post, is a reference to what Sam must have been feeling, watching WarMachine fall out of the sky, and being unable to stop it.

• Poor  Sam, having to deal with seeing another   teammate fall out of the sky that he couldn’t save. The fact that he then    asked about Rhodey, even when imprisoned by Tony’s side of the fight. And     the way Tony (unfairly) blasted him for what happened to Rhodey, even     though it wasn’t Sam’s fault

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trashmouse

Civil War Thoughts: On Steve

So, it’s been taking me a while to get my last thoughts out, and I might do a few more smaller ones before I get to my Steve/Bucky thoughts, but in the meantime, here are my broader thoughts on Steve and his role in Civil War.  Obviously, this will be chock full of spoilers.

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kristhelkat

Crossbones, Steve and the“Your Bucky” scene

So, after watching the scene between Crossbones and Steve for the second time, I’ve been thinking about what he said to taunt Steve during their fight. And I thought of something really upsetting, and I don’t want to suffer by myself so I’m telling you right now.

Some spoilers below the cut. All right? Here we go.

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your-pal-your-buddy-your-bucky

http://your-pal-your-buddy-your-bucky.tumblr.com/post/143896165551/photoset_iframe/your-pal-your-buddy-your-bucky/tumblr_o6pnl2ofgC1ue0q32/0/false

Is it too early to start talking about mid credit Bucky and what it all means? Because, honestly, some people seem to be uncertain about his future, but I don’t think there’s any need to be.Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier is all chrome and black leather, a range of colours associated with weaponry, the bad guys. Not white. Never white. That is, until the scene where we leave him. SERIOUSLY, LOOK AT THE SYMBOLISM OF THIS OUTFIT HERE.White trousers, white shirt, someone remarked he’s got bare feet in the opening scene, if the camera had panned back a little on the end scene, I’m fairly certain he’d be barefoot here as well.. He’s in ALL WHITE, the colour of innocence and purity and in western religious circles a colour symbolising the washing away of one’s sins. Renewal. I don’t know what’s going on behind him, but it’s giving off a golden glow, I swear they couldn’t have made him look more like an ACTUAL SAINT if they tried. You think this is the end for him? White is for new beginnings, not endings. Watch this scene again, the white, the gold, the serene smile. This scene is the baptism of Bucky Barnes. The boy is getting REBORN.

Is all this deliberate? I think it is, consider the juxtaposition they’ve given us in the opening and closing scenes of this film. The beginning, pre title scene of a man, Bucky Barnes being awoken from the ice, dressed in black, cloaked in darkness. Not yet the soldier, just the man, being dragged into a place of darkness and screaming agony and forcibly turned into the Winter Soldier, against his will. The ending, the man who was the Winter Soldier, dressed in white, bathed in light. Not being dragged, but choosing to go back into that ice to become Bucky Barnes again. The scenes mirror each other in every way, not just in the motions, but the lighting, the costuming, the tone; darkness and light, black and white, piercing screams and hushed, peaceful tones, coercion and free will. I know it’s just a silly superhero movie, but this is beautiful stuff right here.

Look, okay, I see Bucky as the heart of this movie, Bucky’s my fave, so maybe I’m biased, but I can only see a new beginning here. But you know what, even if this WERE the end of his story, I’d be happy with this. I couldn’t have asked for a more respectful treatment of my baby. And I think he’s going to be just fine.

bucky barnesmarvel metacivil war spoilersmy baby

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http://giveusalol.tumblr.com/post/143535916488/gender-subversion-in-cacw

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*More about Steve’s trauma, keeping in mind that afte Peggy’s death, the only preson left alive who rmembers the original Steve Rogers, is Bucky.

steverogersorbust

you know. sometimes i think. in the face of tony’s obvious trauma and ptsd. in the face of the more obvious pain that bucky has suffered. we forget that steve’s motivation in the film isn’t just his tendency to hold stubbornly fast to his ideals, to do what he feels is right and damn the rest.

steve’s hurting too.

like. guys. we are so ready to give weight to tony’s emotional boiling over point at the end of the film, to say “this is why he tried to kill bucky, and it’s not right but it’s understandable.” we are so ready to acknowledge the fact that bucky was a victim and motivated to run by his fear of further persecution and hurt from nefarious forces. what about steve, though? when do we acknowledge that steve’s not just acting with righteous arrogance, but a deep anger, isolation, fear, loneliness, sadness, and hope?

steve died. like, his last memory before waking up seventy years in the future is a few days after watching his best friend fall from a train and he was unable to stop it he willingly flies a plane into the fucking Arctic, ostensibly to his death.

guys. guys. tony was fucked up for years because of untreated ptsd after falling from space and thinking he was dead. why is it so hard to remember that steve probably is fucked up, too?

this dude, he wakes up seventy years in the future and he has to make his way without really anyone or anything familiar, and the only person who is familiar is suffering from memory loss, and he’s now operating under the thumb of shadowy organization that he’s not 100 percent does good things and that continuously lies to him. there’s no war to fight, but that’s all this body is good for. it’s all he knows.

he doesn’t know what makes him happy. guys.

and so he goes through another trauma when he discovers this villain who is trying to kill him is in fact the dead best friend who—surprise!—was actually captured after falling and losing an arm andhis brains were scrambled to turn him into a murder assassin. we know for a fact steve feels tremendous guilt over this. but imagine beyond guilt, the sorrow, the nightmarish possibilities, that are turning over in steve’s head. the idea of what his friend suffered. remember when rhodey fell from the sky and tony blasted sam in the chest? imagine the anger in steve’s heart at the idea of what bucky’s suffered and the unwillingness to let that go unchecked and unsaved.

oh, plus. that shadowy organization he’s been fighting for? the people he’s been taking orders from? the top dog in the neat little hierarchy that’s arranged his world? yeah. hydra. everything steve has known turns upside down. he can’t trust anything. imagine the paranoia. the suspicion. imagine the fear that must take seed at that betrayal.

and then! of course, then he begins fighting these battles with the avengers where the collateral damage is on such a bigger scale than it was at war. where there are aliens. aliens, you guys. and he’s tasked with leading this motley crew of superheroes in a world he’s still getting used to and people die, lots of people die, and we know that even if it doesnt visibly affect him like it affects tony (who always seems shocked when he’s confronted with loss, because it’s presented to him on a personal, individual level) it does affect him. that steve feels the guilt of lives lost. imagine that burden. imagine the weight of the shield, the mask, the responsibility. imagine the loneliness. thefear.

so then. then. in the space of a few days. steve deals with more guilt from the deaths in lagos. he shoulders that burden. then he deals with the moral quandary of signing the accords. he wrestles with that decision. peggy dies. he grieves, oh goodness does he grieve. vienna fuckin blows up andthat elusive best friend is now the suspect. so steve is grieving, he is confused and conflicted, and now he feels doubly guilty—that’s the person he has been looking for, should he have already caught him? did he do it? he couldn’t have. does he bring him in? does he shoulder this responsibility too? what will they make him do when he catches up to bucky? what should he do? steve might act like he always knows what’s right, but a decision like this isn’t easy. it messes with a person. and when you’re dealing with all that mess in your head, sometimes you don’t think. sometimes…you act.

like when bucky is triggered, when steve stops a helicopter with his bare fucking hands, you can feel the desperation. that’s not ordinary heroics. that’s not steve just trying to stop bucky from escaping and possibly hurting others. it’s steve fighting for bucky. for this piece of his past. for the possibility of an end to loneliness. for the possibility of redemption for letting him fall.

and when they go on the run, when they know they have to stop the supersoldiers, when they clash with tony’s team, can you imagine steve’s sheer frustration that no one gets what is at stake? that no one is willing to listen? and yes, he didn’t even try—but why is that, you think? is it possibly because steve is used to institutions and those in power ignoring what he thinks is right and causing disaster anyway?

when steve says, “pal, so are we.” when steve acknowledges to natasha that he’s 90 not dead, when he openly references the fact that he and bucky are 100, can you imagine knowing that? adjusting to that? being 20-something in body and memory but 100 in actuality? living in a body that people perceive as a weapon so strongly that you’ve become a weapon when you are still longing to rediscover the man you were? steve’s not just cap. steve’s steve, and he doesn’t know what makes him happy you guys. he’s a guy, he’s a human, and he’s dealing with A Lot.

i get that he makes some bad calls in the movie. so does tony. my beef is that while tony’s decisions are often supported by his very obvious trauma and emotional burden, we rarely seem to give enough weight to the very real and very similar turmoil that is going on inside of steve.

when tony is fighting him in siberia. when steve says, “he’s my friend,” so simply, so sadly, without any righteousness, just clean tired truth, that’s steve as steve. when he hid the truth from tony, that’s steve as steve. when he drops the shield, that’s steve reclaiming himself as steve. we expect cap all the time, because often, steve is cap. it’s easy to see him as the moral police that way, if reductionist.

but we forget to see steve as steve. that he is a kid, in some ways. and a grieving, lost, lonely kid with a lot of anger, sadness, confusion, and power boiling under the placid-seeming surface.

steve rogerscivil warcacwspoilersmeta

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scififreak35

Steve and the Sokovia Accords

I keep seeing a lot of posts about how Steve was in the wrong in CACW because while Tony had a plan, Steve didn’t offer any alternative to it, he was just like NOPE. The thing is though, something that immediately struck me when I watched the movie was the timing of everything. Ross and Tony bring Steve and the others the Accords THREE DAYS before they are to be signed. Those Accords were not drafted, approved and supported by 117 countries in a week. This was 100% intentional. This is also very, very common in American politics. When politicians want to pass a bill they don’t want people to look at closely, they schedule votes at weird times or when a large # of people are away from the Hill (Capital Hill). So you get these 11th hour bills that are hundreds of pages long that no one has had a chance to read, ask questions about, or negotiate on about changes. These bills are stuffed with completely unrelated stuff that gets passed as well because the whole thing has to be signed off on/approved. It’s called “pork barreling.” Those are the questions Steve tries to bring up to the group. When he’s like ‘what happens when…?’ And Tony brushes aside his concerns like ‘oh, I’m sure we’ll get to make changes later when everything dies down.’ But Steve is like what are we agreeing to NOW though? And practically as soon as they are given the “generous” 3 day warning, Peggy dies. Steve flies off to London and everything goes to hell. What time is there to propose or discuss an alternative plan??

The timing was 100% intentional to make sure the Avengers would be subject to the Accords as written–no matter what was lurking on the bottom of page 440 in fine print. Steve is 100% right to be suspicious. This is one of the dirty tricks of American politics that Steve would be totally aware of. And sure, maybe there’s a chance that everything was above board, reasonable, and so on, but you would NEVER sign a thing like that w/o actually checking/reading it. that would be foolish. I mean, did we forget that Project Insight was authorized and approved by The World Council? I guarantee you that Steve hasn’t. I absolutely believe that Steve would have been willing to talk everything out, negotiate, listen to everyone’s pov, and really consider everything carefully…but there’s no time given to do that. It’s all last minute, non-negotiable, and shady. Steve is a master tactician, natural leader, and a reasonable, thoughtful person who is a Big Picture thinker. It’s weird that people just assume he rejects the Accords because he’s being childish or something. That’s not Steve Rogers at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Headcanons on Tumblr

This is mostly people just making up their own stories and head canons on Tumblr. For me, this is one of the most fun things on there. Just like the last one I posted where people basically re-invented American magical systems, by extrapolating from JK Rowling’s misconceptions of American culture. (I’m going to revisit that again because I just love the idea of different magical systems being influenced by  cultural, environmental, and    geographical constraints.)

Plus, there’s some meta in here about LOTR and some critical essay type stuff, like this insistence (from men, btw) that women’s armor have titties, or flowers, or something on it to designate that a woman is in it. Why? Exactly what purpose is served by decorating the armor that way?

mathylibrarian:

bestnatesmithever:

kiokushitaka:

adrastuscomic:

iwoofjaneway:

“ It’s armor. On a woman. It doesn’t have to look feminine.”

If I ever don’t reblog this, it’s because I’m dead.

game devs take note

What a weird impulse. Why would you need it to look feminine? Or masculine? It’s armor to protect your body from death. Not dying should be gender neutral.

Not dying should be gender neutral

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Anonymous asked:

Can you tell me why Frodo is so important in lotr? Why can’t someone else, anyone else, carry the ring to mordor?

notbecauseofvictories answered:

but someone else could.

that’s the whole point of frodo—there is nothing special about him, he’s a hobbit, he’s short and likes stories, smokes pipeweed and makes mischief, he’s a young man like other young men, except for the singularly important fact that he is the one who volunteers. there is this terrible thing that must be done, the magnitude of which no one fully understands and can never understand before it is done, but frodo says me and frodo says I will.

(when boromir is thinking of how he can use the ring to defend gondor, when aragorn is thinking of how it brought down proud isildur, when elrond is holding council and gandalf is thinking of how twisted he would become, if he ever dared—)

but then there’s frodo, who desires nothing except what he has already left behind him, and says, I will take the Ring.

it is an offer made out of absolute innocence, utter sincerity. It is made without knowing what it will make of him—and frodo loses everything to the ring, he loses peace and himself and the shire, he loses the ability to be in the world. It’s cruel, the ring is cruel, it searches out every weakness you have and feeds on it, drinks you dry and fills you with its poison instead, the ring is so cruel.

and frodo picks it up willingly. for no other reason except that it has to be done.

(the ring warps boromir into a hopeless grasping dead thing, the power of the palantir turns denethor into an old man, jealous and suspicious, it bends even saruman, once the proudest of the istari, into a mechanised warlord, sitting in his fortress and bent over his perverse creations—all the best of intentions, laid waste)

but there’s a reason gollum exists in the narrative, which is to show—well, to show what frodo might have been. because even as frodo grows mistrustful and wearied, as the burden of this ring grows heavier and heavier, he is never gollum. he is gentle to gollum. he is afraid—god frodo is so afraid for 2/3 of these books he is so tired and afraid, but he keeps moving, he walks though it would pull him into the ground, because he asked for this, he said he would.

someone else could have carried the ring to mordor, I suppose. the idea of a martyr is not dependent on the particular flesh and blood person dying for some greater purpose. but such a thing has to be chosen, lifted onto your shoulders for the right reason, the truest reasons, and followed into the dark, though it would see you burnt through and bled out.

I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.

Source: notbecauseofvictories

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More critiques of fandom racism, or as Stitchmedia likes to call it “Klandom.”

stitchmediamix

We’re never believed when we talk about racism in fandom and people are just so eager to silence us.

I’m on the “fandom racism” tag on tumblr because I occasionally do like to find new people to block when I see this blogger talking about the white women in fandom doing shipping olympics to justify not shipping Spider-Man with Zendaya!MJ.

Their next post in the tag comes from some anon fussing at them, accusing them of generalizing and blaming a “vocal minority” in the same anonymous message. (”hardly any white girls probably even care about spider-man” the anon said as if a majority of transformative fandom isn’t made up of white women and therefore, the spider-man fandom has a ton of white women in it)

Nevermind that people have been shitting on Zendaya since the second that the news dropped (and btw, it’s still not official news from Sony/Marvel).

Nevermind that the Thor fandom is now pretending that it cares about Jane Foster in order to excuse misogynoiristic complaints about Tessa Thompson playing Valkyrie and possibly playing Thor’s love interest.

Nevermind that every time a Black woman is cast as a white character, white men derride her appearance and white women dismiss her character and act as if she’s unworthy of being in a relationship with the white fave she’s undoubtedly cast opposite.

Nevermind that already I’ve seen female members of fandom talking about how “it’d be nice to have a Spider-Man movie where Mary Jane doesn’t have a love interest” (like Homecoming already doesn’t have that!!).

When we (fans of color and anti-racist allies) talk about the racist abuse we see directed towards, fans, actors, and racebent characters of color, the first thing we see is their outstretched hands demanding “proof” and acting like making up racism is like a thing people actually do.

It pisses me off so hard because right now, we’re getting it from two sides: members of “mainstream” fandom constantly crapping all over Black women as if it’s their job and (largely female) members of transformative fandom who’ve learned to couch their racism and hatred of women of color in social justice rhetoric so it looks like they’re fighting for us, not against us.

And even though you can look at Twitter, in tumblr tags, and google this shit, people are still like “I don’t see why you’re complaining, it’s not a big deal”.

Our anger is reactionary. We are reacting to endless racism aiimed towards fans, characters, and creators of color. If you sincerely believe that the right thing to do when faced with this reality is to demand proof and get mad when it’s given?

You can fuck right off.

text posts fandom ugh UGHUGH long post

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*Why Candice Patton is a total bad-ass!
finnnorgana pocketlass

attoseconds:

westallendiaries:

attoseconds:

Candice Patton as Iris West helped play a massive part in Kiersey and Zendaya being allowed to portray superhero love interests, and opened doors that would have been closed to them three years ago, when they wouldn’t have even been considered an OPTION.

Candice Patton as Iris West helped show execs that a WOC as a romantic lead is a smart decision. From their standpoint, it’s likely financial, but little black girls are going to be allowed to see themselves as the girl the hero loves, wants to be with, and get to see themselves being Important to the story.

One day, saltyass haters will realize that’s why Candice Patton as Iris West is needed, because she’s making a *difference* and one simple casting decision is shaking 50+ years of history for the better.

“Playing this role, I sometimes get blatant racism and the even more painful and complicated non-blatant racism. But, I gladly put on my armour each day and take it. I have to be strong and continue to deliver, because this is bigger than me. It’s not just about this role, its about the landscape of film and TV. It’s about the young girls coming after me. I need to make sure I was strong enough to keep that door open for them.” – Candice Patton

She’s honestly such an amazing human being and I love/respect/adore her SO MUCH.   Source: attoseconds

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*More explanations on the Zendaya freak-outs:

Zendaya as Mary Jane

brownstocking:

racebending:

jrashad51:

This can be taken multiple ways to me.

1. If everyone gets mad when people of color are played by white people, why can’t white people be angry when it’s done to them?

2. White people have taken roles from people of color for so long, it’s only right if we do the same to them.

3. It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. Zendaya went through the same audition process as everyone else and she just happened to be the best one for the job.

I’m more in tuned with number 3.

1)  They can be angry, and they are.  Frequently when a role is racebent like the role of Mary Jane has been rumored to be, many white fans will express anger around it.  They are more than entitled to express their opinion about the media product and they know it.   Nothing stopped angry white people upset about racebent Johnny Storm from giving Michael B. Jordan crap about being cast in the role, for example.   The anger does make folks who do that look ignorant; however, because they have access to representation that the PoC they are complaining about lack.   White fans who are upset about a mixed race black actress playing MJ have access to representation through the main character and much of the supporting cast, representation through the writer, director, producers of the movie (and the white execs of Marvel Studios), and representation through countless other superhero movies–including three Spider-man movies with a white MJ.  Girls of color who consume superhero movies simply do not experience the same.    They can be angry, but it looks petty.

2)  What is happening here is not “the same.”   PoC being cast in racebent roles for supporting white characters (and having to receive racist flak for it) is not the same as white actors using raceface or whitewashing to score lead roles.

3)  We don’t really know what process resulted in Zendaya being cast, but her casting as a love interest for Peter Parker does matter because it makes a major social statement, and it is a form of media representation.

werd.

Also can we stop acting like Mary Jane has to be white? Not only is she a fictional character, but her only defining characteristics are red hair, lives in NY, grew up with Peter. That’s it. Despite the hype white people don’t have a lock on red hair. And Zendaya is the first Mary Jane cast for live action who does have that flirty personality that everyone associates with Mary Jane Watson.

Source: jrashad51

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*Along with Black Women in  movies Tropes:

stitchmediamix karnythia

Trope

abbiehollowdays:

Giving a black male character a black female love interest (the earlier in the series, the better), but either:

A. Only show her in flashbacks because she’s dead
B. Kill her off within a few episodes
C. Write her as being an irredeemable bitch who the BM character has already divorced/broken up with or will divorce/break up with soon.
D. Have her choose her career over the relationship.

That way writers have “proved” that he doesn’t hate black women (or hates one “with cause”). Then he’s free to experiment or fall in love with female characters of other races (especially white) and they never have to show him with a black female love interest again for the rest of the series.

Source: abbiehollowdays racism antiblackness misogynoir

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*I am absolutely loving this Arthurian explanation for why Finn is a Jedi. Finn is The Awakening that the movie talks about. There’s a lot of fandom that likes to villainize him and/or erase his presence, but they can’t erase the fact that this movie’s title is in reference to Finn, as much as it is to Rey. 

In my mind, the reason he loses his battle to Kylo is because it’s his first real lightsabers fight, and he was never trained to use that weapon. It’s the first time he’s ever seen, or held, a lightsaber. He doesn’t know the rules. He’s never had a Yoda, or been anybody’s Padawan.  He becomes uncertain about his intentions and focus, (he gets scared), and  is finding it increasingly difficult to keep his connection to the Force, (if he even knows what that feels like), that purity of purpose that made him accept the lightsaber in the first place. It’s as if, right in the middle of this fight, he experiences the terrifying magnitude of what he’s doing. (Omg! This the leader of The First Order! What the hell am I doing?!!)

One of the rules of using the Force is purity of purpose. Without that, it’s easy to fall to the Darkside, or lose one’s connection to it, and just as Yoda said, emotions cloud intentions. This is probably something that happens a lot  to  students of the Force, and I’ll wager that Finn probably doesn’t even know what that is, although, like Rey, he’s heard of it.

jawnbaeyega adagalore

luminousfinn:

Maz giving Finn the lightsaber is noticeable for many reasons, not least of which because it happens twice and for all the Arthurian parallels surrounding the scenes.

 

The first time takes place just after the destruction of the Hosnia system which is what makes Finn return to Han (and implicitly to the fight against the Dark Side). At this point none of them knows that they’re about to be attacked themselves by the First Order, not even Maz.

Despite this she immediately upon Finn’s return  takes him, Han and Chewie into the cellar where she keeps the lightsaber. When she takes it out of the chest Han recognizes it and asks where she got it, she brushes him off and focuses on Finn.

Why Finn? Last she saw him Finn made it clear that he was leaving. Hosnia’s destruction marked a tentative return, but so far it is tentative. And wouldn’t Han a man who might not be a paragon, but someone she’s know for years, make more sense?

Her words as she passes it are ambiguous. “Take it. Find your friend.” And do what exactly? Give it to her? Use it to protect her? What? Recall, no one but Maz and Rey herself knows that Rey can use the Force at this point. In fact Finn is never told this in TFA.

In assorted other things the fact that Han’s attention shifts off Maz and onto Finn the moment she tells him to take it, but before she stops talking is interesting. His intent gaze on Finn as he makes the choice to take the weapon is mirrored in the second “giving” by Maz.

Maz too is looking rather expectantly as Finn reaches out and takes the lightsaber from her. The music that has so far been playing softly in the background swells dramatically the moment Finn’s hand touches the saber and mixes with the diegetic sound of an approaching TIE fighter as Finn raises the lightsaber as a young Arthur might Excalibur. The scene ends in a dramatic boom as the castle is struck just as we see Finn look at the saber with a serious face.

It is noticeable that Finn is so entranced by the lightsaber that he doesn’t seem to hear the incoming TIE. Not long before at Niima Outpost he jumped at the first sound of it, but here he’s oblivious to the noise.

Now before I go on to the second “giving” I’m going to make a small detour around Arthurian myth.

Much have been made of the Arthurian parallels in TFA. Kylo Ren as a Mordred like figure. Luke as either a Merlin or a fallen Arthur himself and of course Rey pulling the Skywalker lightsaber out of the metaphorical stone. But the Arthurian parallels have been ignored where Finn is concerned, especially when it comes to the giving of the lightsaber/Excalibur, because in Arthurian myths there are two kinds of givings of that sword. One is Arthur pulling it out of the stone which declares himself the true king of Britain, in the other it is given to him by The Lady of the Lake.

In both versions Arthur starts out as a youth of unknown parentage grown up fostered by strangers, just as Finn is. In the second versions Arthur runs into Merlin, often portrayed as an older, wiser man. Depending on the version Arthur either asks Merlin for help or about his future, in either case Merlin takes him to The Lady of the Lake.

The Lady depending on the version of the tale is either a powerful magical being or a High Priestess of Avalon. She proceeds to ask the young Arthur several question and put him through a test which he fails, but she sees that though he is not perfect he has a good heart and a true spirit. Realizing this she bequeath him Excalibur, the sword of the true king and the mark of a hero.

Maz is in a quite literal sense The Lady of the Lake. She a powerful alien, strong in the Force who has made her home on a lake.

Her initial interactions with Finn runs parallel with The Lady’s testing of Arthur, complete with Finn “failing the test” by choosing to leave. But in deciding to return to the fight Finn proves to The Lady of the Lake that he’s heart and spirit is true and so she gives him Excalibur (the Skywalker lightsaber) to wield.

 

That she means for him to wield it and not just as a caretaker becomes clear in the second “giving”.

When they exit the now ruined castle the dark forces are upon them and battle is joined. Maz once more tells Finn to go find his friends.

This time Finn has no intention of leaving proving him once more worthy of Excalibur and this time Maz’s words are unambiguous, she intends, and always intended, for him to be a wielder of the blade, not just a carrier.As Finn again lifts the Skywalker lightsaber and this time ignites it, Maz look on with great expectancy clearly meant to mirror the audience. Will “Excalibur” accept Finn as its wielder? And will Finn accept the lightsaber as his?

At first we see doubt on Finn’s face, it’s an unfamiliar weapon and a Jedi’s weapon to boot. How can he wield this? But Maz believes he can and Finn is nothing if not up for whatever challenge life throws at him so he ignites it. The blade flashes to life in his hand, accepting him as a worthy wielder, and the moment it does Finn’s decision is also made. He may not be a Jedi (yet), but the sword is his.

 

tl;dr. There is a lot of Arthurian coding around Han (Merlin) bringing Finn (a young Arthur) to Maz (The Lady of the Lake), Maz testing him and in finding that he has a good and pure heart gives him the Skywalker lightsaber (Excalibur). The sword allowing itself to be ignited (drawn from the sheath) confirms Finn’s worthiness as its wielder.

Source: luminousfinn LISTEN THIS IS THE CONTENT FOR WHICH I AM HEREGOOD SHIT RIGHT HERE OK finn facts finn meta finn is force sensitiveboth rey and finn are gonna be jedi ok choke on THAT

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*This would make an excellent alternative to those War of the Worlds movies! Yeah, pretty much most of the wildlife of Australia is dangerous, from various sized birds, to insects, and forms of sea-life, like jellyfish, octopi, and stonefish. This explains why  Aussies are the way they are, I guess.

cumaeansibyl:

swaff-original:

ladyshinga:

beautytruthandstrangeness:

ellidfics:

tygermama:

myurbandream:

jabberwockypie:

skeletonmug:

artiestroke:

splintercellconviction:

giraffepoliceforce:

I really want a science fiction story where aliens come to invade earth and effortlessly wipe out humanity, only to be fought off by the wildlife.

They were expecting military resistance. They weren’t counting on bears.

Imagine coming to a hostile alien world and being attacked by a horde of creatures that can weigh up to 3 tons, run at 30 km/h (19 mph), and bite with a force of 8,100 newtons (1,800 lbf).

By the time you realise that they can traverse water, it’s too late. The surviving members of your unit manage to make it back by shedding their excess gear and running for their lives; the slower ones were crushed to death within minutes.

You later describe the creature to one of the humans you captured, wanting to know the name of the monstrosity that will haunt your nightmares for cycles to come.

The human smiles as it speaks a single word, slowly and distinctly, in its barbaric tongue.

“Hippopotamus.”

This is giving me the biggest, creepiest grin I might have ever grinned

Imagine being the next crew to go down to earth and thinking “it’s fine, we got this. We have the weapons and equipment necessary to deal with bears and *shudders* hippopotamuses. We’ll be fine.”

And at first you are, you’ve learned how to dodge. You’ve learned where their territories are. You know how to defend yourself.

But then one night you are sleeping in your shelter. You’re in a tree covered temperate part of earth. It seems benign. There are been no sightings of the dreaded “hippos” around. Not even any bears. But there is a slight rustle of the undergrowth. You try and ignore it telling yourself it is just the wind.

Then you hear the rustle again. closer this time.

You peer out into the darkness but see nothing amongst the trees.

The rustle again and now you realise you can smell something. It’s musky and slightly foul. It’s the smell of an omen, a warning. But what of? Where is this smell coming from.

You sit up, but it’s too late. The foul smelling creature is on you. You are hit with 17kg of coarse fur and vicious bites. Long dark claws tear in to you and you are pinned down white the striped creature tries to bite your throat.

It takes some doing but you manage to wrestle free. Blood drips from your wounds and already they itch with the sign of infection. The creature has a bloodied snout, rust rad, mingling with the black and white hairs. It lets out a terrifying growl from the back of its throat and looks to attack again. It’s between you and your knife, so your only choice is to back away.

Eventually the creature gives up and snuffles off in to the undergrowth, down a hole near your shelter you hadn’t noticed before.

When you make it back to your base you once again consult the captive human.

“Badger.” they say, with a solemn nod.

One word: Moose

“Our vehicles are far superior to the local human models, in range, speed, armament, and any other metric you care to name! Nothing could possibly-”

BAMrumblerumblethumpcrash!!!

“That’s called a moose.”

“We should be free of the threat of the ‘moose’ here on our new floating accommodation”

*humans start sniggering*

“… they can swim, can’t they”

*humans start laughing louder*

….

*mid-winter*

‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED! K’T’SURKIK WENT OUTSIDE AND A MOUND OF SNOW ROSE UP AND ATE HIM’

“What is this ‘wolverine’ you speak of?”

Tell me the story of the unpleasantly surprised alien invaders and their captive human remnant, getting more smug the more the aliens fail at basic scouting…

I know we’re all talking the big smash-‘em-up type animals, but what about the little ones? Are aliens prepared for spiders? Mosquitoes? Fleas? Ticks? Even humans get sick or die from some of those, who knows what the fuck they’d do to an unprepared alien.

Nobody expects the mosquitoes

Turns out skunk spray is fatal to the aliens, whoops

Truthfully aliens would try to attack, land in Florida & get taken out by snakes, gators…you name it. Or they would land in Australia & the whole continent would attack. Imagine being the alien that doesn’t take a kangaroo seriously and gets beat the fuck up. Or the one that tries to approach an ostrich and gets kicked to death? They landed once, maybe twice & then they decided we breathe death & are surrounded by monsters.

Source: giraffepoliceforce

*I love this particular headcanon.

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*Who goes to a party to watch the TV show House Hunters? That’s just so many levels of wrong. Is that even considered a party? Can you be still be friends with someone who invites you to one of those?

karnythia antimana

went to a househunters-watching party over the weekend; here’s my impression of the show

thewinterotter:

idiopathicsmile:

VOICEOVER: She wants a historically accurate thirteenth century castle in the heart of bustling downtown L.A. He has his heart set on living in a small metallic orb that would float over a bottomless gorge, beyond space and time. Can this pair of newlyweds see eye to eye???

WIFE: The location is nice but I don’t know about these staircases…I just had my heart set on an escalator made of sand and artisan brie.

HUSBAND: Well it’s definitely not a small floating metallic orb.

REALTOR: That…would defy several laws of physics.

WIFE (squinting): Do you have anything that is simultaneously larger, cheaper, newer, and more historic?

REALTOR: Um.

WIFE: And I need a big kitchen. I love to cook!

(Cut to footage of the wife in her current kitchen, wearing an apron and surrounded by pots and pans. She is hitting a banana with a hammer. On the counter next to her is a pile of doll hair.)

HUSBAND: Yeah, get her a nice kitchen. Of course, I won’t be spending any time in there, ha ha! (His laugh is loud but his eyes are so empty. They are empty all the way back.)

WIFE: And I need a room for my shoes. That is simply non-negotiable.

HUSBAND: Also, if we can swing it with our budget, I’d love a finished basement where I can really unwind and stew in my toxic masculinity and repressed emotion. And hardwood floors.

WIFE: And hardwood floors.

HUSBAND AND WIFE IN EERIE UNISON: Hardwood. Floors. (somehow it sounds like way more than two voices, more like the collective whisper of an army)

REALTOR: Okay, I will certainly, um. See what I can do? Anyway, this next house, it’s a metallic orb hanging on a sturdy cord near a ravine—

WIFE: Well it’s definitely not a genuine thirteenth century castle—

HUSBAND AND WIFE: (stare at each other in open contempt)

REALTOR: Heyyy so why don’t we take a look inside?

This is the most accurate ever depiction of House Hunters but I’m still stuck on the idea that somebody somewhere thought a PARTY to watch HOUSE HUNTERS was a great idea like why do you hate yourselves.

Source: idiopathicsmile

Okay, I was working on my finalized list of shows to watch and review in the Fall, the next Hannibal review, Naka Choko, and a review of Brooklyn 99. Oh, and BBC is now showing the first season of Into The Badlands, from the beginning.

I just finished watching the finale of The British Baking Show, where I  cried for the winner, too, a young Indian woman named Nadiyah. She was awesome, and I was rooting for her, and I thought she wouldn’t win because there was a White guy in the contest, too. He was nice enough, and quite talented, but I didn’t want him to win, and he made some baking mistakes. But Nair came through, with a cake based on her Indian style wedding. It was gorgeous and I wanted some. She didn’t believe she’d  won either, at first. But it was lovely. Her husband and family were very supportive, and of course they got to eat all her practice work, so…

I like British reality shows better because there’s less bullshit talking, the contestants actually seem to get along ,and there’s less chatter just to hear oneself say something, and fill in space. The contestants just seemed like nice people in a contest, trying really hard. None of them were trying to play to the camera by trash talking their opponents, grandstanding, or letting their egos write checks they couldn’t cash, something I absolutely hate about American reality shows. They also came across as more intelligent but that might just be a British thing, in general.

TTFN!

 

 

Good Things on Tumblr

It seems that the only time I mention anything on Tumblr its almost always some kind of racial takedown or dragging or bad news. Well, this post is going to celebrate all the positive stuff  I’ve seen on Tumblr. Please visit these websites, sign onto Tumblr if you can.

I know it seems like we spend an inordinate amount of time beging Hollywood for representation, and that’s important, but it needs to be known that Hollywood isn’t the only game in town when it comes to diversity. SO here are some online links, if you’re interested. (And its okay, these are safe spaces for you to express yourselves. Some of the other sites I  link to may not be too welcoming.)

 

*I do not watch Once Upon a Time, but when I heard that Mulan was on the show, I was kinda kickin’ myself. (That doesn’t mean I’m going to go back and binge it though.) The costumes are gorgeous.

eastasiansonwesternscreen

rebloggedstrawberry-split

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strawberry-split

13 weeks of ouat positivity:
• Week 12: favourite costumes [8/15]

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I have not yet had an opportunity to read Monstress. So far I’ve just been eyeballing it on Amazon and my Comixology emails. But I’ve heard some great things about it. If you’ve heard anytihng good, and would rec this, let me know.

superheroesincolorrebloggedsuperheroesincolor

superheroesincolor

Monstress # 4 (2016)  //  Image Comics

Story: Marjorie Liu , art: Sana Takeda

[ Follow SuperheroesInColor on facebook / instagram / twitter / tumblr ]

Get it now here@

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*Okay, you know I had to add a little bit of no-goodnik to this post. The Pretty Feminist is a staunch advocate of diversity across the MCU. She is fighting all these battles with clueless fandom, so that I don’t have to.

I think the two worst items on this list is: the treatment of Martha Jones whom I love; and the idea that people are actually  shipping Natasha and T’Challa, without any examination or understanding of  how problematic is the insertion of white characters into the Wakandan narrative. Some people only seem to care about inclusivity when they want to insert white characters into the narratives of PoC. When it happens the opposite way, their championing of diversity seems to disappear.

theprettyfeminist

The struggles of being a black fangirl

Queen Guinevere fans: Spent years defending Gwen from fans who said that a black woman being in a medieval fantasy show was unrealistic, despite the show featuring magic, wizards and dragons.

Martha Jones fans: Dealt with continual racists and sexist attacks from Rose Tyler fans who felt that Martha was trying to replace Rose.

Bonnie Bennett fans: Dealt with years of racist attacks and Delena fans demanding that the writers kill off her character, despite her playing a major role in the books.

Iris West fans: Constantly fighting against people who want Iris to be written out of the show or killed off, despite her being the female lead and the wife and mother of Barry Allen’s children in the comics.

Michonne fans: Constantly defending Michonne from fans who openly refer to her as unattractive and not a proper love interest for Rick Grimes (aka not white)

Abbie Mills fans: Spent the last 3 years fighting for Abbie to stop being sidelined and disrespected by the writers, only for the writers to kill her off and turn her into a sacrificial negro.

Finn fans: Constantly dealing with Reylo fans arguing that Finn is not a proper love interest for Rey, but somehow, a genocidal father-killing maniac, who also made a not-so-veiled rape threat to her, magically is.

T’Challa fans: Currently dealing with Bucky and Natasha fans who are pushing for them to play a major role in the new Black Panther movie. Oh, and let us not forget the Natasha/T’Challa shippers who are actively advocating for Nat to become the new queen of Wakanda. Because having a white Russian assassin who used to work for Hydra being the queen of an African nation isn’t creepy or racist. Nope, not at all.

Source:theprettyfeminist

#fandom while black#BOY IS IT SUFFERING#fandom racism

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Addendum:

karnythia

Also for all of the “Why should this Black female character have to be a love interest?” that fandom pushes? Where is the “Natasha is strong, she doesn’t need a man?” from those feminist fans? I mean, if you’re looking for a female lead who isn’t “reduced” to a love interest? Natasha’s right there. No one is in love with the Black Widow & that could be your great Strong Girl lead. Go on, embrace that instead of trying to shoehorn her into a relationship with every Black lead in the MCU.

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Addendum II:

karnythia

Also, we do know Wakanda is successful because there are no white people in power right? Like that’s literally the context of Black Panther’s books from the very beginning. No one in Wakanda needs to rely on Bucky, Steve, Natasha or whoever the fuck else to teach them to do a damned thing. They have the science, the resources, the military prowess…Wakanda is literally what every other country on Earth aspires to be and can’t achieve. That’s canon. None of your white faves have shit to offer Wakanda or her people. Nothing. Nada.

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 *A celebration of Richonne:  

whoareyouandwhyshouldicare

The ABC’s of Rick and Michonne

A is for Apple

B is for Besties

C is for Carl

D is for Dat Ass

E is for Eye Fucking

F is for Fences

G is for Glances

H is for Hands

 

I Is for Influence

J is for Judith

K is for Kisses

L is for Laughter

M is for Mints

N is for Nurturing

O is for Okay

P is for Parenting

Q is for Quick

R is for Ruh roh

S is for Snuggling

T is for Trust

U is for Undeterred

V is for Vital

W is for Whipped

X is for X-rated

Y is for Yearning

Z is for Zombies

grimesgirl26

LOVE IT!!

They’re perfect from A to Z:)

Source:whoareyouandwhyshouldicare

#richonne

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*I barely even watch Game of Thrones, but I know these two characters and Brienne is one of my favorites on the show. Actually she and Jon Snow, are the only reasons to look at it.

FOLLOW

gifsofgot

Tormund Giantsbane: Ｉ ∟ＯⅤ∈ Υ〇∪…..φ(｡･ω･｡ )
Brienne of Tarth: (☉д⊙)

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/05/brienne-tormund-couple-game-of-thrones

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More on Cleverman, which I’m kind of looking forward to:

What if Only Aborigines Had Superpowers?

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@I DO NOT watch sports movies or televsion shows because, as a general rule, I’m completely disinterested in sports. I don’t know that I’ll watch this show, because my priority is always SFF shows, but if you like sports and WoC, go for it, and let me know if its any good.

 

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   jawnbaeyegarebloggedchescaleigh

   

   

   

   

   thrace-

   “The all-new FOX Series, PITCH, tells the emotional story of GINNY BAKER who became the first woman to play Major League Baseball.”

   Guys I can’t tell you how excited I am for Pitch. Ever since I first heard about it I’ve been waiting for the pilot and here it is! It stars Kylie Bunbury as Ginny and is in affiliation with Major League Baseball, as in made with their help and advice. Here’s a good article in THR about how onboard MLB was with the creation of this show.

   Anyway this is a sports show about a black woman on a major network and I’m SO FREAKING EXCITED. Go watch the trailer and leave a like so the network knows that people are interested and watching.

   Source:thrace-

   #it’s lit fam#pitch#to watch

 Yeah, Firestorm is one of my favorite characters from Legends of Tomorrow. I remember readng the comic books when I was a kid, and I’m kind of freakin’ out, a little bit, that this character is  in a TV show now. I didn’t care too much for a lot of hte reboots over the years though, because things started to get really confusing.

1. superheroesincolor

   

   

   

   DC’s Legends of Tomorrow  //  DC Comics

   Firestorm (Jefferson Jackson)

   Watch it now here

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   [ Follow SuperheroesInColor on facebook / instagram / twitter / tumblr ]

   #Franz Drameh#Firestorm#Jefferson Jackson#Black Superheroes#DC’s Legends of Tomorrow#DC Comics#tv

   81 notes

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And, of course, this post wouldn’t be complete without Shum!

shadowhunterspocdailyrebloggedmalecshappiness

Follow

malecshappiness

FAVOURITE MAGNUS’ LOOKS(as voted by my followers): #12

#reblog#gifs#shadowhunters#1.10#magnu

Hannibal Season Two : Su-Zakana

 

Parallel:

(1) :  similar, analogous, or interdependent in tendency or development (2) :  exhibitingparallelism in form, function, or development <parallel evolution>b :  readily compared :  companionc :  having identical syntactical elements in corresponding positions; also :  being such an element.

Wow, this one has parallels running all over the place. Somebody better stop them before we get hurt.

Su-Zakana is one of my all time favorite episodes because it stars the weird, and lovely, Jeremy Davies from Saving Private Ryan, Ravenous and Justified. Here, he plays Peter Bernardone, a character who is a close parallel to Will Graham. Bryan Fuller has stated that Bernardone is a stand-in for Giovanni Di Petro Di Bernardone (the Italian) otherwise known as St. Francis, the patron Saint of animals.

In this episode, Will and Jack, while ice fishing, blatantly lay out their  plan to use Will as bait, to get Hannibal to incriminate himself as The Chesapeake Ripper. This is a very delicate game. Will, essentially, has to go undercover and  sidle up to the beast by convincing him that he is just another beast like him, all while not actually becoming the  beast he’s pretending to be.

Will has to look into the abyss and hope he isn’t destroyed by it looking back at him.

Its interesting watching Will and Jack’s  smooth, and easy camaraderie, after all they’ve been through together. Their venture is not only going to require Will to do some serious acting, but Jack as well. I’m still not sure Jack entirely believes Hannibal is The Ripper, or if he’s just going along with Will’s plan as a means of atonement for believing Will was The Ripper. Has Will convinced him? I know that later Jack is convinced but I’m not certain when this moment occurred.

We next see Jack and Will at Lecter’s house, eating the fish Will caught earlier. Will has cannibal jokes, for which he is rewarded the side-eye from Hannibal and Jack, and Hannibal counters with the term, “Nietzschean Fish”, (words  that can only be dreamed up in the mind of Bryan Fuller). They’re both shameless flirts. Hannibal seems especially jovial. Will is back in therapy with him, Alana is in his bed, Chilton is out of the way, and Jack suspects nothing. Hannibal is in a happy place right now.

The theme of this episode, from the title (su-zakana is  a small dish used to clean/refresh the palate), to the discovery of a murdered woman sewn into the body of a dead horse, is renewal and rebirth. The renewal of Jack’s and Will’s collaboration in capturing the Ripper, and solving serial murders, and  the renewal/rebirth of Will and Hannibal’s therapeutic  relationship. There’s lots of mentions of cocoons and chrysalises.

This episode also introduces the Mason/Margot Verger portion of the Thomas Harris’ book, Hannibal. Margot has been sent to therapy with Hannibal for trying to kill her abusive brother Mason, after he broke her arm during a sexual assault. Hannibal  always wants people to fully and completely experience their darkest self, so encouraging her to wait until a better moment to kill him, or getting someone else to do it for her, would naturally be his advice.

Note Margo’s high collars, the high broad shoulders of the suit, her severe makeup  and dark clothing. (Its almost samurai in appearance.)  This has the effect of giving  her a prim, hard look, in keeping with her dour facial expressions, subdued manner of speaking and her mental state, after her brother’s violation. Her clothing is like armor.  This is a woman who is utterly drained of emotion, and resigned to her fate with Mason, or she has just gotten so good at hiding what she’s  feeling, that it has become a habit with everyone. (Or she could simply be resentful of having to be in therapy.) Contrast her attitude towards Hannibal, after he advises her she should kill Mason, with before he offers that advice. And contrast her facial expressions in therapy with the expressions she wears when talking to Mason, or Will Graham.

In the book,  Margo Verger is a grotesque stereotype of a transgender man. Actually, in the book she’s not transgender, at all. She wants to be a man because then can she inherit the Verger Fortune. I think Bryan Fuller took offense at this character too, changing her significantly for the show, jettisoning all the insulting stereotypes, and just making her a lesbian, (or bi-sexual. She does sleep with Will later in the season.)

Later that evening, after Hannibal and Alana have sex, Alana expresses bafflement at Will resuming his therapy with Hannibal. She’s concerned that Will has ulterior motives and will try to hurt Hannibal again, (entirely in keeping with Alana’s fiercely protective nature.) Hannibal tells her that Will tried to hurt him because he thought he was protecting Alana from Hannibal, which we know is a load of horse pucky, as Will didn’t know the two of them were sleeping together, at the time he tried to have Hannibal killed.

Jack calls Hannibal to a crime scene involving a murdered woman whose body had been stuffed into a dead horse, and Hannibal says that this is a situation that calls for Will Graham’s expertise. Will’s assessment is that whoever killed Sarah Craber is not the same person who stuffed her into the horse and that his motive  for her was rebirth.

An examination of Sarah Craber, by Jack’s forensic team, releases a bird that was entombed in the woman’s chest. This bird, which looks like a small crow or raven, could signify the release of her soul. Such birds have a mythology of being “psychopomps”, creatures that carry souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead. (Think the movie The Crow.)

After examining the crime scene, Will and Jack interview Peter Bernardone, a disabled man who works with animals, in a kind of personal mini-zoo. Bernardone is a mirror to Will Graham. Like Will, he also has an unusual brain disorder, that because of a previous brain injury, does not allow him to look at an object and touch it at the same time.  There is also a real world version of this condition called agnosia (the inability to process sensory information),  usually caused by a brain injury. The syndrome gets worse when Peter is under stress. In a sense, he and Will have impaired vision. Unlike Will, he is a genuinely gentle soul that has never actually harmed anyone. (Will has shot one man, and attempted to arrange the death of another.)

Will  starts that whole bonding thing with Peter. Like Hannibal, he really cannot seem to help  stop himself and I suppose he can’t. In the book, Red Dragon, Jack makes an observation about Will’s behavior with other people, how he would mirror their  body language, or adopt their accents or speech patterns. Jack, initially, thought Will was mocking these people, but soon came to realize that Will was entirely unaware of what he was doing and I will assume that’s the case here, as Will  immediately tailors his voice and body language, to adjust to Peter’s condition. He speaks in a warm and compassionate manner, not just because Peter is emotionally fragile, but because  I’m sure he sees himself in Peter, as well. He believes Peter when he says he’s innocent, understanding the importance of affirmation because he didn’t receive any from his “friends”when he declared his own innocence.

Hannibal’s  mantra to both Margo and Will is, “Doing bad things to bad people makes us feel good.” Will, in his conversations with Hannibal, confirms this. Its not exactly untrue as this is the very thing that fuels people’s need for revenge, or rooting for the villain to get his comeuppance, in movies. Basically, it feels good when the bad guy gets it, especially when you do it yourself.

In Will’s next session with Hannibal, they discuss Will’s new outlook on the world. His rebirth, as it were. Hannibal does wish Will would move past what he thinks Hannibal did to him, and focus on the bigger picture of accessing, and freeing, his murderous tendencies, focusing instead on what he’d like to do to Hannibal.

Contrast Will’s authoritative, “Don’t lie to me,” to his pleading with Hannibal in season one, not to lie to him. Here, Will is calm, assertive, and in firm control. This is a command, not a request.

Both Hannibal and Alana are suspicious of Will’s return to therapy with Hannibal, although he doesn’t bring up this subject with Will until after Alana mentions it.Will’s excuse is that he can’t talk to anyone else about what’s happened to him, that he  still fantasizes about killing Hannibal, and it is only now that he finds Hannibal interesting. (This statement is a callback to the season one episode, Apertif, when Will said the two of them would never  be friends because Hannibal was uninteresting.)

The forensic team determines that Sarah Craber’s body was not the only one, and find a field of 15 bodies, from which hers had been taken, and stuffed into the horse’s corpse. At the scene, Zeller offers Will an apology for not believing him about being the Chesapeake Ripper. He feels guilty because he thinks if he had supported Beverly in trying to re-determine Will’s innocence, she would have confided in her team and would still be alive. He is probably not wrong. This makes me like Zeller a little more because he’s kind of a dick.

There is also a sub-theme in this episode of people bullying and manipulating those under their authority. In a later session with Hannibal, Margo discusses how she reached the point of trying to murder her bother. So we have Margo being bullied and degraded by her brother, who was their father’s favorite and  heir, so Mason controls all the money. Hannibal advises her to wait for a better time to do it or find someone to do it for her.Then there’s Peter Bernardone being manipulated by his social worker, Clark Ingram, to take the fall for his serial killings, and Will Graham who has also been abused and manipulated by Hannibal, his psychiatrist.

Will manages to gently coax the information from Peter about how he found Sarah’s body, and that it was his social worker who  was her killer. He hasn’t told anyone because he doesn’t think he would be believed. Will makes a point of letting Peter know he believes him, and calls Clark in for an interview.

Clark Ingram is interviewed by Alana. This is a scene that showcases what Alana does and how good she is at it. Basically, her job is what Hannibal was called to do when he first met Will, assessing people’s mental capacity to go to court, hold certain jobs within the organization, or assess types of mental illnesses, as she did in season one, with Abel Gideon.

During the interview, Alana appears to be a lot less obtuse than she’s usually shown. She was mostly clueless during season one when it came to assessing Will’s mental state, and I think the entire audience for this show agrees with me, when I say I winced every time she and Hannibal were shown having sex. Its  telling that she and Hannibal never seem to show any other forms of affection outside of bumping uglies. I had the impression that the two of them are not in love. They definitely like each other but its more like friends with benefits, or each other’s side piece.

I think Alana’s problem is that once she’s close to a person she completely loses any ability to be objective, which I can fully understand. Its just that in practice, on the show, its something that makes her appear kind of dense. Here, she masterfully manipulates Clark to get him to show his psychotic side. Clark blames Peter for the deaths and is let go. There’s a interesting, antagonistic exchange between Jack and Will about the interview. Will expresses some bitterness to Jack during the interview, recognizing his situation in Bernardone’s, of not being believed, when he pointed his finger at an authority figure. Jack tells him he pointed in the wrong direction. Both of them are putting on an act for Hannibal.

Clark immediately goes to Bernardone’s mini-zoo and sets free or kills all of his animals as retribution for Peter’s accusations. There is a marked difference in tactics between Hannibal and Clark. These two psychopaths are very different. Clark, like Chilton, isn’t nearly as smart, or subtle, as Hannibal. Hannibal actually does care about Will, (although he doesn’t seem to know the extent of his feelings for him), and sees Will, mostly, as an equal. Clark doesn’t see Peter as an equal or a partner. He isn’t trying to elevate Peter to a higher self. Clark views Peter much the way Hannibal views the people he eats.(They mean nothing beyond their use to him.)

Hannibal too, lacks empathy but is attempting to transcend that  by understanding Will. He seems to realize that his lack of empathy hampers his relationship with Will. Clark isn’t doing any such thing. He isn’t trying to understand Peter and doesn’t care about him, and isn’t trying to be friends, nevertheless, Will can’t seem to get past the parallels in these two relationships.

Peter returns to find all his animals gone, and is confronted by Clark.

Will, understanding that Clark is guilty, and perhaps sensing that he will retaliate against Peter, heads out with Hannibal to make sure Peter is okay. In the car, Hannibal points out the similarities between their situation and Peter’s, and Will’s need to save him. He tries to assure Will that he’s got his back and Will is not alone.

It’s interesting that we almost never see Will driving anywhere. We know he can drive and owns a car but I bet none of you can tell me what the make and model of that car is, either. He almost always seems to be falling asleep in someone else’s car. Hell, I don’t even know what make of car Hannibal drives, although we can be sure its a high-end European model because that just seems like his taste.

They arrive to find Peter alone in the barn, with the body of another horse, and suspect Peter has stuffed Clark’s body inside, since that’s the kind of thing he does. However, unlike Sarah Craber, Clark isn’t dead, and in one of Hannibal’s more disgusting pieces of imagery, in a series filled with such things, we watch a grown man crawl out of a horse’s  corpse.

Filled with righteous fury, on Peter’s behalf, Will threatens to shoot Clark but he is stopped by Hannibal, who convinces him that Clark is not a worthy substitute for Hannibal. This is not an act on Will’s part as he actually does pull the trigger. It is only  Hannibal’s thumb, coming between the hammer and firing pin, that saves Clark’s life. Hannibal is naturally proud of Will’s willingness to kill but doesn’t want him wasting all that murderous energy on Clark, as its not so much rage at Peter’s situation that has him in such a state, as rage against Hannibal’s behavior towards him, Hannibal says Will should save all his anger for him.

And yes, we can talk about  another image of Hannibal cradling Will’s head, the seat of Will’s intellect and emotions, and the part of him that Hannibal considers the most important, and most often does so when attempting to manipulate Will to some goal of his. Over the course of the series we get  several shots of Hannibal touching Will’s face or head, whereas Will rarely touches Hannibal, and never initiates touch, even when circumstances would make it excusable. Whenever Hannibal touches Will, Will often passively allows it, neither pulling away, nor protesting the treatment.Though many fans view Hannibal’s physical behavior towards Will as that of lovers, and Fuller himself states that it is a love story, I often viewed their dynamic much like   that of Mason’s and Margo’s relationship. You have an older, paternalistic,  authoritative, and abusive sibling, who  dominates a younger, rebellious one, and touch is just one more item in their arsenal of manipulation.

In therapy, Margo has much in common with Will. She often states what Will’s actual feelings are towards Hannibal. When  Hannibal asks if she loves her brother, she emphatically states that she does, which is why she can’t bring herself to kill him, even though he is abusive to her,   nevertheless she still plans to kill Mason someday, this parallels Will’s feelings and plans for Hannibal.

Notice how the scenery and plot spirals down into the story of Will and Hannibal as the season progresses. When the series began, the story and settings seemed more open and expansive but as the plot begins to focus more and more on their relationship, the settings become darker, more intense, with less humor. Everything begins to feel  more claustrophobic as  there is nothing that seems to  happen outside of the handful of people in the series, Jack, Alana, Will, and Hannibal, and there are fewer and fewer daytime and outdoor scenes. Even though Will is no longer actually confined, as he was in the beginning of the season, the viewer  starts to feel confined by the tightening closeness of the plot, lighting, and set.

Also as the season progresses notice the change in Will’s attire from the first season. The closer he gets to Hannibal in his bid to capture him, we see less of the StagMan, but Will does start to emulate Hannibal in other ways, much like Franklyn, Hannibal’s first patient from season one. Will’s clothes have become darker and he wears lots of blue, as a callback to his confinement in the blue jumpsuit at he hospital. Like Margo he wears protective high collars, or scarves, and not just because it seems to be winter forever on this show. Notice that characters who feel especially vulnerable, in this series, often wear dark, armor-like clothing, high collars and neckwear, (Abigail, Will, Margo). Characters that don’t feel that way, and are more open about their feelings, wear more open clothing, in lighter colors, like Alana, Mason, and  Hannibal.

For more on Hannibal’s style of dress:

Stylishly Executed – The Clothes of Hannibal & How To Dress Like Lecter

 

 

Tumblr Talks About Media

Bringing you the ongoing geekery on Tumblr and Twitter, where it seems most of the arguments about PoC and the media seem to be occurring. Plus random geekery feat. black people, including announcements of new shows and just hey!isn’t this pretty kind of stuff.

Black Panther:

 

adiosassholes

top ten mcu characters according to anya & lia
✘ t’challa/black panther

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hollywoodreporter.com

Michael B. Jordan Joins Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ (Exclusive)

It is unclear who Jordan would play but one source told THR that it could be a villain.

marvelgifs

Michael B Jordan will reteam with his Creed director Ryan Coogler for Marvel Studios’ Black Panther, inking a deal to join movie’s buzzy cast, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

It is unclear who Jordan would play but one source told THR that it could be a villain.

Source:marvelgifs

#it’s lit fam#black panther

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 One of my all-time favorite Star Wars characters, ever!

jedipilotstormrebloggedssammmy

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ssammmy

 tfa gif meme [1/5 characters] » FINN
“I’m not Resistance. I’m not a hero. I’m a stormtrooper. Like all of them, I was taken from a family I’ll never know. And raised to do one thing.” 

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 Shonda Rhimes new Shakespearean drama, Still Star Crossed, which I’m totally here for, and the deeply (and I mean deeply) ignorant backlash against this, as if black people hadn’t been invented until 1964.

medievalpoc

ABC Orders Shondaland’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ Sequel, “Still Star-Crossed”

ABC’s “Still Star-Crossed” stars Wade Briggs as Benvolio, Lashana Lynch as Rosaline & Sterling Sulieman as Prince Escalus

Written by Heather Mitchell, and based on the book by Melinda Taub, the “Romeo & Juliet” sequel is titled “Still Star-Crossed” and is set in 16th century Verona, picking up where Shakespeare’s original work ended. It chronicles the treachery, palace intrigue and ill-fated romances of the Montagues and Capulets in the wake of the young lovers’ tragic fate.

Teaser Trailer:

https://youtu.be/TVwa9wQq40Q

 

Source:medievalpoc

#still star-crossed

 And the people who are so angry about people of color in their Shakespeare adaptations can stay angry.

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* And now for the backlash and response. Warnings: for some racist bullshit in the mid-section of this article:

Sophie Okonedo in The Hollow Crown

[images via]

Apparently I should be checking out this miniseries adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, immediate-style.

mycroft-holmes-lestrade

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG! A black woman playing a white English queen? And I’m not even talking about the armour nonsense. What’s next a native american roman emperor wearing a grass skirt? A white Ghandi wearing ripped jeans and psychedelic shirts?

If you throw reality and historical accuracy out of the window for being PC you’re movie isn’t worth watching because it can have no real message.

medievalpoc

And this is why I don’t have any plans to stop blogging here anytime soon. Until the concept that “historical accuracy” means “only cast white people” dies a well-deserved death, I’m going to keep posting art and documents that prove that casting historical adaptations with people of color is MORE accurate that leaving them out. When it comes to Black women characters in European Medieval and Renaissance theater, you can go back to PRIMARY sources and see them for yourself:

It sickens me that after three years of posting my research, there are still people who look at images as beautiful as these and say that it’s wrong. This is a Shakespeare adaptation; are you seriously sitting there thinking that everyone’s in Shakespeare’s writing, or in Elizabethan England, was white? The idea of people of color existing outside where YOU think they should be is somehow ridiculous?

You’re wrong. You’re Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,WRONG.

freedom14movement

this angers me to an enth

nabokovsshadows

These are the same people who complain about white washing. Yet also claim Einstein was black.

leicsfox

urgh, unless someone can prove English monarchs during the War of the Roses were POC then I will not be watching this show.

nabokovsshadows

Such a double standard. It’s wrong to turn poc historical figures white but it’s also wrong to turn white historical figures to poc. Social justice warriors are always trying to rewrite history to fit their agendas. People on tumblr constantly lose their shit over their false claim cleopatra was black. Yet a white British queen is black and that’s fine. It’s nonsense.

leicsfox

utter nonsense; insulting nonsense as well

and it seems lots of people are to afraid to say anything

even many of my fellow historians

nabokovsshadows

That’s because if you call out their lies and delusion they scream racist. They are bullies who are turning what should be a serious accusation into something meaningless. Sadly they are too stupid to realise this and how harmful it ends up being towards victims of real racism. It’s the boy who cried wolf but instead it’s the SJW who cried racist. Not to mention medieval poc has been called out countless times for talking utter shit. Not to mention a few personal accusations. Which I take with a pinch of salt but still they are out there.

leicsfox

Hopefully everyone not already in the cult knows to ignore them now

and totally agree

a house built on lies will never survive a storm

medievalpoc

And again I’m noticing that it’s when a person of color is cast in a role considered to be the “property” of white people only, because, you know, “historical accuracy”, that’s when everyone really comes out of the woodwork to show what’s really important to them.

If I’m wrong, go ahead and tell me why I’m wrong. Show me some links, documents, artworks, citations or precedents. Explain why the director of the miniseries’ claim that he chose the best possible actress for the role is wrong:

Dominic Cooke explained the decision to cast Sophie in what is considered to be a traditionally white role, saying: “Well, in the theatre we’ve been doing this for donkeys years.”

He said that he wanted to go with the actor who was “right for the part” rather than any other factor.

Dominic went on to say: “I think Sophie is the best person in this country to play that part, I really do. Her visceral power and range is so extraordinary – that’s what I was really looking for.

And hey, when you can’t attack the truth of what someone has to say anymore, you try to cast aspersions on who and what they are  to try and discredit what they have to say. Because that’s a wholly new and original concept, right?

Every time we see a sign of real, concrete change, there’s twice that amount of backlash. I post pictures like these ones of Sophie Okonedo because so many people STILL have a massive, vocal problem with seeing an actress of color, especially a Black actress, playing a Medieval European role. I’m really not sure how any of you who’ve commented really can believe, or that anyone else can believe, that you care about “the truth” when it’s painfully obvious that what you really care about is Whites Only, Forever.

Also, “Social Justice Warrior”? That’s the best rebuttal anyone can come up with? This is tiresome and old, and I’d like to think after three flipping YEARS of doing this, someone would have come up with something better than “SJW!!”, personal attacks, and “b-b-b-but HISTORICAL ACCURACY!!!”

Photos

Source:medievalpoc

Sophie Okonedo in The Hollow Crown

 

angryfangirlsdobadthings

Oh quit bullshitting like this isn’t about your racism. Anthony Hopkins did Titus Andronicus as a half-dream half art piece with Saturnius and Bassanius using podiums and 1950′s style microphones to argue which one of them should be king. Kenneth Branagh did Hamlet in the Victorian Era. David Tennant did Hamlet in a fucking t-shirt. “Sons of Anarchy” was based on the story of Hamlet and it was about a motorcycle club running guns to the IRA. Don’t give me any shit about fucking ‘historical accuracy’ you fucking ponce, it’s SHAKESPEARE- it’s literally been done by a dog dressed in little hats and jackets (Wishbone, I never forgot you) and Wednesday and Pugsley Adams. If you have a problem with this you are not only a racist asshat, but you are so damn ignorant of Shakespeare I don’t even fucking know why you bothered to have an opinion except to let people KNOW you are a racist asshat.

diversehighfantasy

And I mean, all good Shakespeare companies blind cast. Shakespeare companies pretty much invented that. An African-American actor was playing King Lear in the 1820s in London, yet  people still get bent out of shape over actors of color in Shakespeare in the 2010s. It’s a long tradition, unlike the movie and TV tradition of casting people of color mostly in small roles and only “when there’s a reason for it.”

diversehighfantasy

 *These are the type of criticisms PoC get from people who know no form of history, or have ever read Shakespeare, but have the nerve to go online and make arguments like the ones above.

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*And finally, this happened. I have since heard that the lead female character from Castle was ousted from the show because Nathan Fillion hated the actress. Interesting behind the scenes rumors.

Agent Carter Cancelled by ABC

wilsontoyourhouse

and plus it’s not like AC fandom gave a shit about what fans of color thought anyway!

every time a fan of color brought up lack of diversity they’re always crowing ‘just keep watching! just keep supporting the show! they’ll have more diversity next season!’. ‘wait your turn’ basically. ‘let us have ours and you’ll get yours in eventually. just wait your turn. baby steps :)’

all that, all the time from white fandom. ‘if you don’t support the show it’ll be cancelled and you’ll never get to see representation! just support AC and more diversity will come!’

ha. shows what you know.

 

FOLLO

 

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*I have never played this game, what I know about it comes from books but I was unaware that the movie had been “whitewashed”.

 

 I hope the Assassin’s Creed movie bombs not because domestic abuser Michael Fassbender is the lead, but they were supposed to tell the story of Altaïr. Instead we have a white assassin from Spain with tribal paint and a Moor-themed outfit. Not only

fandomshatepeopleofcolor said:

is this blatant whitewashing as the Moors descended from Northern Africa, but it’s a disrespect to Spanish speaking cultures as well. They literally used a surname as the assassin’s first name (Aguilar) just because it means eagle. Moreover, I’m not only a non-white Latina, but have Moorish descency and regularly get mistaken for being Middle-Eastern so I obviously find this movie disrespectful to my ancestors. And it sucks that Fassbender is not only director but Aguilar and Callum.

The Assassin’s Creed movie is real shitty especially since we’ve been bombared with white male leads as of late. This would’ve been a perfect opportunity to tell a Syrian assassin’s story or introduce an entirely new poc character. Fuck Ubisoft.

Yeah, as someone who played the games, I am really disappointed – I was hoping we’d get a Middle Eastern protagonist, PLAYED BY A MIDDLE EASTERN PERSON instead of some tan, stubbled white dude (see: Prince of Persia and Gods of Egypt)……and instead we get this boring lazy whitewashed re-hash with freakin Aguilar instead of Altair because they want the same concepts but without the color.

They don’t actually want Middle Eastern people to play anything but villains.

But, what REALLY kills me is that Altair means close to the same thing as Aguilar. (altair means bird)

They wanna keep every element of the story down to the smallest details but wanna literally white-wash not only the history of Moors and the culture, but they whitewashed the damn game too.

I mean, they couldn’t have just gone with Ezio if they wanted a white male protag that badly?

As someone who loves videogames and would be happy to see a videogame movie suceed for once, I’m actually hoping this one flops too.

– Mod K

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Seriously with the Assassin’s Creed movie, they had like 4 other games they could’ve pulled from the series if they needed their white protag so badly(all which are always acknowledged over the characters of color the series has). But no, they HAD to mess with Altair’s story for other reason but to whitewash. Hope these whitewashed movies keep flopping. When that’s out in theaters I’ll be playing Assassin’s Creed 3 and Liberation with Connor(native american) and Aveline(black).

fandomshatepeopleofcolor said:

fandomshatepeopleofcolor:

Exactly.

If you wanted your mid-30′s brown haired grizzled white man with stubble aka. the only video game protagonist anyone know how to make, why don’t you pick the white boy faves of Assassin’s Creed? Pick Ezio, Shay, and Jacob if you want ANOTHER white male lead.

This just takes it up to a whole other level in appalling and racist.

Seriously, I’ll be playing Assassin’s Creed with the non-white washed, Syrian assassin named Altair, instead of watching this whitewashed knockoff.

-Mod K

#FUCKING EXACTLY#adewale has so little attention partly bc he is black#same with aveline#not just bc their games are dlc#it’s fucking racism#dont tell me that a whole horde of people saying they prefer ezio to ratonhnhaké:ton has nothing to do with racism either#only 1 chinese assassin and she doesnt even have a proper main game just some chronicles crap#same with the indian assassin#yes i know henry green is indian too but he is a side character

(tags via @explodingdickbits)

*I have been wondering about this for some time. Read these articles about the Grizzled White Male in video games. I’m just baffled that game developer’s their world building is astonishing, but they are completely lacking in imagination when it comes to creating people for these games.

http://www.indiewire.com/article/the-curse-of-the-scruffy-white-male-why-representation-matters-in-video-games-20140720

http://www.destructoid.com/brown-hair-and-stubble-the-new-face-of-modern-videogames-178442.phtml

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And on a light note, here’s our Daily Shum! Magnus Bane go, ahead!

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Black Widow thoughts:

spoonmeb

UNPOPULAR OPINION

I feel like I’m the only person on Earth who doesn’t want a Black Widow movie.

Two reasons:

1) ScarJo has been in like 40 marvel movies, Lucy and she’s about ruin Ghost In The Shell. I honestly don’t care if ScarJo never works again.

2) White Women starring in films is not progressive in 2016+

Give me a Misty Knight/Colleen Wing movie. Give Storm the full length feature justice she’s long been denied. Introduce the movie going audience to Kamala Khan and/or America Chavez. I’m psyched that Wonder Woman is finally getting a movie, but letting white women join the party just isn’t enough for me.

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*I think this person has  reached Peak-ScarJo!

Ooh! Some more Black Panther stuff.

destinyrushrebloggedbellaxiao

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bellaxiao

the importance of Black Panther

Geeking Out About : WoC in SFF

 

 

Lately, geekdom has been having some interesting,  and contentious,  new discussions regarding diversity in some of our favorite shows and films. Women of Color have always been in it, because hey! we live on this planet, too, and I just want to give a shout out to some of my favorite WoC, who inspired my Pop Cultural geekiness.

At first, I was going to do a post just on Black women, but I decided I needed to put it up or shut it up, and include all women of color, who have brought and continue to bring their “A” to the  game and those who have and will always inspire me to be ” That Weird Black Girl”.

Nichelle Nichols As Uhura, on the Original Star Trek, she wasn’t just a secretary, she was also an engineer. There were plenty of times we watched her fixing her communications station. She was Boss! And been credited with influencing more Black women to go into the sciences,  than any other woman on this list, including this astronaut:

This is Dr. Mae Jemison and her flight gear handler. (Get your Google on!)

When I was ten years old, I thought Nichelle was everything a Black woman should be. Smart, elegant, graceful,  beautiful. She taught me that Black women, (that I), have a place in the future. Until Nichelle put her thing down, a lot of us had never been taught that we had a future.

Rinko Kikushi

I have it on good authority that little Asian girls look up to the character of Mako Mori, from Pacific Rim, but Rinko makes this list because I loved her character’s  backstory, and Mako’s show of character, in fighting for what she wanted, but still respecting her adoptive father’s wishes, played by Idris Elba. Also my niece is totally little girl-crushing on that defiantly, blue streak of hair.

Lucy Liu:

 I just like watching her.  She never seems to take any of her jobs too seriously, has a quirky sense of humor,  and always has a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

Rila Fukushima: Throw it up! for Rila’s exemplary sword work in the movie The Wolverine. I was impressed. She’s not my picture of Yukio from the comics, but she is perfectly acceptable.

Dichen Lachman:  Dichen has been in a number of genre TV shows, most recently Marvel Agents of Shield. She is, hands down, one of the most gorgeous Asian women on TV. And yeah, she kicks ass, too.

Saya: From Blood:The Last vampire. She’s got a sword and she’s hardcore. I will be  introducing my niece, a huge Hitgirl fan,  to Saya, this Summer.

Chun Li: From the Streetfighter video game. I always chose this character whenever I played any version of  this game. She had some sweet and fun moves. (The movie sucked, though. We try to ignore it.)

Devon Aoki: She starred in Sin City as the very lethal, and’ terrifyin’, Miho. Miho was all business.You do not fuck with Miho.

Eartha Kitt: She is, as far as I’m concerned, , the first, the one, the only,  and the  true, Catwoman.

Tina Turner As Aunty Entity, she ruled BarterTown,  in a dress made of chainmail. Seriously people! CHAINMAIL! She also had a misplaced British accent, a gang of football thugs as henchmen, and some monster trucks, so you can keep your Furiosa, because Tina got there first. (Just kiddin’! I love Furiosa.)

Rutina Wesley The  first time I saw Tara, on True Blood, she was giving a convenience store lurker, the very erudite backside of her tongue. Afterwards, she  beat up another lady, in the store.  I couldn’t help but love her, as I have fond memories, of giving  people the business end of my tongue, when I was younger and less diplomatic, (just without the beat downs, though.)

I made the mistake of introducing my Mom to the show, in its last season. Guess who she fell in love with, right off the beat? Guess!

Freema Ageyema:  The only Black female companion I’ve ever seen on the show, Dr. Martha Jones, also did a couple of stealth episodes of Torchwood. I’m not a huge fan of Dr. Who, but I’ve watched an episode here and there, and I enjoyed watching Martha and her family on the show.

Naomi Harris: The first time I saw Naomi, she was bludgeoning some  guy, with a machete, and getting high on pills and falling in love with Cillian Murphy, (and who wouldn’t?) in 28 Days Later. Then, in Skyfall,  she sniped James Bond with a high powered rifle. Naomi always brings it. She is  currently Ms. Moneypenny, James’ handler, which should give us plenty of opportunities to watch her snipe at him.)

Nichole Beharrie: I love how the writers gave Abbie Mills so much depth on Sleepy Hollow, without racializing all of her. Not everything about a Black person’s life involves race and the writers are very good to introduce the topic only when its necessary to the plot. She, her friends, and her family are all characters, who just  happen to be Black, while dealing with the Supernatural, making Sleepy Hollow unlike any other genre show on television.

Danai  Guirira: Michonne is a total badass. If I had to pick a dream team of women to ride out the apocalypse, she’d be my first choice.

Grace Jones: As a teenager, I admired the Hell out of this woman. It didn’t hurt that she dated or slept with every hot male celebrity you could think of, back in the day. From David Bowie and Adam Ant, to Dolph Lundgren. She also gets special merit for being one of the first Black female Egyptian vampires,  in the  80s movie, Vamp. She never spoke a word, and was still more terrifying than anybody in Twilight.

Jada Pinkett-Smith: Fish Mooney, Gotham. Penguin and Fish are the two best character interactions on the entire show and the only reason to have watched it.

Rosario Dawson: As Gail in Sin City, she liked to bite people. She is currently starring as The Night Nurse on Netflix’s Daredevil. I read a few issues of the Night Nurse when I was a little girl, so if my glee at seeing her finally depicted on the TV screen, is baffling to you, there you go.

Gina Torres:

I will always love Joss Whedon for this one thing. Zoe is totally in love with her husband,  tells him she will be the mother of his child one day, despite his doubts, and is a total badass, calmly tucking her Captain’s chopped off ear into her bra, while rescuing her husband from Russian Space Gangsters. Gina has always been The Queen! The Goddess! from Cleopatra 2525 to Hannibal.

Michelle Rodriguez: 

This is for every movie she’s ever starred in, even if she does die in all of them. Somebody get her role in a movie that she can survive, please.

Jeanette Goldstein:

A better movie would’ve had Vasquez team up with Ripley, to take down the Alien Queen, after all the male characters had been killed. But this is Hollywood,where only one bad ass woman, per movie, is some kind of law.

All these Women of Color are why I am, and always will be, a total Geekgirl, because like I said before, sometimes Women of Color  like to be  Heroes, too.

Hannibal Season Two :Yakimono

The second half of season two often begins with one or more characters thoughtfully engaging in some personal activity. Since they’re often alone we can’t hear what they’re thinking and are left to makeup any story that we prefer.

I like to think the characters are pondering the events of the last episode. This time its Jack’s turn, as he sits, listening to Miriam Lass’ calls to his cellphone, interspersed with scenes of Jack’s forensic team, processing the evidence from Miriam’s body. We watch as she is being fitted with her new prosthetic arm, to replace the one Lecter gave to Jack. We’re left to speculate on Jack’s feelings during this interval, as surely he must be feeling a tremendous weight of guilt and shame, for having believed Miriam to be dead, and hence, never searching for her. (Outside of HannibalLand,  we know a trainee would never have been sent to questions suspects or witnesses in such a case.)

Miriam tells Jack she was actually treated well by the Ripper (calling back to Lecter’s statement to Bella that he employs an ethical butcher and does not believe in unnecessary suffering of animals), when he kept her and even when he took her arm. (Remember, Cassie Boyle’s lungs were removed while she was still alive, which sounds  horrific, except after hearing Lecter’s statement,  we realize she probably never felt anything, if he drugged her before cutting them out.)

All of this must take place over the course of several weeks perhaps,  as it takes time to be fitted with a prosthetic anything.

*Bedelia must have at some point heard, or read, Miriam’s testimony, or got the information from Lecter, because she uses this same claim that she was mentally manipulated, and heavily drugged, to avoid being arrested by the Italian Police, in season three.

Miriam claims not to remember the killer’s voice but she does remember his voice. So Jack, covering all his bases, (because I still don’t think he actually truly believes Lecter is the Chesapeake Ripper), calls Lecter in for an interview with Alana. This is also something that wouldn’t happen in real life, as she and Lecter have a personal relationship, and this would be seen as a serious conflict of interest, on Alana’s  part. It matters not as Miriam points the finger away from Lecter during the interview. She doesn’t recognize his voice.

 

Will is quietly released from the hospital. Chilton confronts Will as he leaves and Will warns him that he is now on Lecter’s shitlist. Gideon has disappeared, so now he and Chilton are the only two people who suspect anything might ever have been done to Will, and Will is not in any particular danger anymore, because Lecter wants to be his friend. Will urges Chilton to confess all his sins to Jack, shine a light on his relationship to Lecter, and try to convince Jack that Lecter is guilty of being The Ripper.

The thing that most humanizes Lecter is his love and admiration for the very worthy Will Graham. The thing that dehumanizes Will Graham is his warm regard for Lecter or certainly that’s what Will thinks. He believes his regard for Hannibal lessens him and that is also one of the primary reasons Hannibal must be destroyed. In destroying Hannibal Will believes he can save himself. But he also understands that in destroying Hannibal he would also destroy himself, because as horrible as it sounds, Hannibal is also the source of Will’s greatest happiness. Hannibal fully accepts him. Contrast that with Jack, for whom his special skills are merely tools, Alana, who would rather analyze him, and Chilton, who’d like nothing more than to dissect him. Everyone in the show, except for Hannibal, treats Will as if he were a two headed bug.

Hannibal wants nothing more from Will than understanding and acceptance. He is very happy to let Will point his high powered perception at him. And, he wants Will to be at peace with the darkness inside him, instead of constantly fighting against it. Is this not the purpose of a good friend?  To want whats best for you? That what’s best for Will is also what’s best for Hannibal is really beside the point.

Fuller has done such a tremendous job of humanizing Hannibal, that like Will, we often forget that Hannibal is a monster. It’s a testament to Fuller’s  skills that he can put us fully in Will Graham’s shoes regarding his feelings for Hannibal. He can show us Hannibal committing his crimes and we’re  still capable of forgetting what he is during the span of an episode.

On his way out of the hospital Will also encounters Jack, and Will is understandably bitter that Jack wouldn’t listen to him about Lecter, when Jack tries to apologize. But Jack seems willing to listen now, after he tells Will of the finding of Miriam Lass. Will explains that the finding of Miriam is not definitive, that any evidence found with her will point away from Hannibal. Jack tells him that Miriam has already stated that her kidnapper was not Lecter.

Jack takes Will to the place where Miriam was found and Will analyzes the scene. He tells Jack that he can’t simply accept Miriam’s word for what happened to her. His point is that he had Hannibal in his head for less than a year, and look what happened to him, so imagine having Hannibal in one’s head for two years. Will fires up his superpower and with almost no evidence, except his knowledge of how Hannibal thinks, discerns that The Ripper wanted Miriam to be found and that Jack can’t trust any of this to be what it seems.

Will goes home to find Alana and the dogs waiting for him. He has a few sassy words for her too. He knows she’s in a relationship with Hannibal. She seems worried that he’s going to try to have Hannibal killed again. Once again, Will impotently warns his “friends” that Hannibal is not to be trusted, and once again, they don’t listen.

Instead of doing what Will told him to do, which is confess his sins and throw himself on Jack’s mercy, Chilton chooses instead to offer his pro bono services to bring Hannibal to heel. He offers to help Miriam recover her memory, which is exactly what Hannibal wants. This is a design that is months in the making. Keeping Miriam alive, making her believe that Chilton is her kidnapper, and finally, contriving that all of the final pieces come together to put the two of them in each other’s orbit.

Will goes to visit Miriam . As the only surviving victims of The Chesapeake Ripper, they have much to commiserate on. Will suspects she has been as much mentally manipulated as he was.

Later that evening, Hannibal has an encounter with an intense Will, in his kitchen. (Once again he has to get in a dig at Will’s aftershave. He does this once per season, as a running personal joke.) This is the prefect opportunity to kill Hannibal, but Will abides within the law, and doesn’t murder him in front of the open door of his refrigerator. He says he’s there to finish their last kitchen confidential,  interrupted by Jack’s bullet.

Will warns Hannibal that his memories have all returned, he’s no longer sick and Hannibal should watch his back. In other words, Will is letting him know,  “Shit is on, bro’. Put on your game face!!” Will pulls the trigger but the chamber is empty.

Jack, as part of Miriam’s therapy, takes her to Hannibal so he can recover her memories. The evidence from Miriam, that the last thing she remembers is a picture of “Wound Man”, points to Hannibal because he fits the profile. But Alana throws Chilton under the bus (not the first time she will do this) by suggesting that Chilton also fits the profile. She states reasons why Chilton might want Hannibal to take the blame. (Yeah, thanks Alana. That’s not biased by your dislike of Chilton, at all.) In attempting to implicate Hannibal as The Ripper, Chilton only drew attention to himself.

Hannibal puts the final touches on his grand design. Chilton arrives home to find the legless, armless, body of Abel Gideon, breathing its last, in his basement office. He tries to escape but encounters Hannibal wearing his plastic suit. Hannibal drugs Chilton and kills the Federal agents who were sent to take him into custody. Chilton wakes to find himself coated in blood and  a massacre.

Chilton runs to Will Graham for aid, while the forensic team finds evidence of “Wound Man” in his office. Instead of helpingChilton, Will calls Jack.He’s trying to tell Chilton, in a roundabout way, that he has a plan for taking down Hannibal and proving once and for all that he is The Chesapaeake Ripper. He just needs Chilton to be patient. Chilton still manages to be pretty funny, though. When Will says running would make him look guilty, Chilton has enough sass to reply that Will didn’t run and he still looked plenty guilty.

Chilton ain’t having any of that, though. When he finds that Will called Jack ,he holds Will at gunpoint, before running away. Will tries to tell Jack what’s really happening but Jack is seriously pissed that he’s lost two more agents and won’t listen to him. He chases Chilton down and apprehends him in the woods behind Will’s house.

We have conflict of interest again, as the same team that processed Beverly’s body, is the same team that gets to process evidence from the man they believed killed her. This is a serious breech of ethics in real life. This is how I know that Hannibal takes place in some alternate world, where crazed serial killers lurk around every corner, nobody owns a television, its always winter, and there’s only one forensic team for the entire nation. I’d also like to point out, once again, that psychological profilers do not participate in arrests and nether do forensic teams, as a general rule.

It is Alana who gets to interrogate Chilton. Once again a serious breech of ethics as she is  known to have an antipathy towards him. As these are his colleagues, neither she, Will, or Hannibal would be called in to consult on his case. Miriam, finally put within orbit of Chilton, executes the final part of Hannibal’s plan. She is triggered by Chilton’s voice into grabbing Jacks gun and shooting Chilton.

Hannibal is delighted to find that Will has shown up for his former evening appointment, although he is wary that Will might try to shoot him again. He is unaware that this is part of Will’s new, more subtle, design to capture The Chesapeake Ripper, by cozying up to Hannibal, and getting him to incriminate himself. (Its interesting that Hannibal has Will’s old appointment slot still open.)

 

Music featured in the episode:

• Bach, Partita No. 2 in D minor BWV 1004 -IV- Gigue – In the interrogation room

 

• Bach, Suite for cello no. 2 in D minor, bwv 1008 I. Prélude – Hannibal having a glass of wine

 

 

Clothing:

Hannibal’s KGB Look

Hannibal’s Serial Killer Dad Look

 

 

Note the change in Will’s wardrobe after his release from the hospital. Previously seen only in rumpled beiges, denims and brown (earth tones), he is now seen dressing in much cooler colors, grays , blacks and very deep blues. Is this meant to indicate the greater darkness in his nature now?  Is this supposed to match Hannibal’s darker wardrobe? Since it’s always winter, he wears a lot of high necked garments, and I wonder if this is in tribute to Abigail’s scarves from season one.

Also, note the change in his silhouette. It’s straighter, slimmer, more rectangular, with sharper angles in the shoulders and at the waist. It has the effect of making Will look noticeably taller and more refined and elegant, which is not a way he could’ve been described in the first season. This new style of dress is a reflection of the clarity and sharpness of  his mind and purpose. This is man without fear, who is wholly confident in what he’s doing. We’ll see more of this confidence in the next episode.

 

 

 

 

 

The Walking Dead: Bugging Out

In honor of The Walking Dead Finale, I thought I’d repost this, (from waaay back in 2014), with some minor edits:

If you’re a fan of zombie fiction you know  what “bugging out” means. For those not in the know, it means having a packed bag ready, with a couple articles of clothing, water, and food, so you can vacate that urban environment, that will soon be overrun with zombies and wild humans.

Well, I ain’t buggin’ no-damn-where. I sure as Hell am not going to run out to the woods, to survive the apocalypse. And, should you ever find me in the woods, you will know that civilization, has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

No, no! I’m good here.

Seriously! Have you even watched the show The Walking Dead? Its as dangerous running around in the woods, with wild animals, cannibals, bikers and walkers as it would be to live in the city. At least, in the city, there’s no chance of also being eaten by bears or starving to death when you run out of granola.

And why would I go running out to the woods, when I don’t know one damn thing about living in the woods. I do know about living in the city. What’s more , I know about living in the city sans utilities. I don’t like it but I got that shit down. I know where everything is, which buildings are the best fortified and most importantly, where to find the best vending machines.

It doesn’t matter how many countless hours of Survivorman I have watched, there’s a lot of shit that just isn’t covered by that show. How am I going to get my hair done? (There are no Natural Haircare specialists in the woods.) What about moisturizer?( I have very dry skin, especially on my elbows.). Or sunscreen?

What happens when I get my period? (There’s no chocolate in the woods and I don’t believe bugs are a good substitute for that, no matter how many people say they’re good for you.) How am I going to stay clean during my monthly, with no water, when I’m not even allowed to wash my hair? What happens if you get sick out in the wilderness? I have asthma when it gets cold, and my nose likes to have a sinus infection, at least once a year. Something tells me that running around in the forest would up that quota. I would run out of Puffs in about thirty minutes.

Also, where would I go to use the toilet? I ain’t fo’ no squattin? That’s just not my bag. I have lived with the Porcelain God (and his accessory,Toilet Paper), my whole life. I shall worship them forever.

Command me, Lord!

And, most importantly, what am I going to read? There ain’t no books in the woods and I’m not making my own. There’s only so many I could carry. I could scavenge them from any houses I stumbled across, but I don’t want to risk being shot because I needed new reading material, and Americans don’t read, anyway,  so the likelihood of finding books is pretty low. Since Americans who do read, have atrocious taste in books, the likelihood of finding a good book to read would be nil.

It’s also extremely difficult to find yarn, for  my crocheting, in the woods.

Let’s face it, most of us are not equipped for forest living. I know far more about living  in the Big City, than I do about  living in the woods. I live on Lake Erie, so water would be readily available. There’s plenty of food and other resources to scavenge and sleeping under a ready-made shelter, like in an office building, is way nicer than sleeping in a bag on the ground. It most certainly would be less wet.

Yes, there will be more zombies in the city but there’s also more people to fight them. And Black people don’t have a problem working together and cooperating with each other to meet a common goal like food production or zombie fighting, although, the going narrative seems to be that people in the city would have less of a chance to survive. I call bullshit on that narrative. I’m assuming whoever came up with it,  thinks Black people would lose their shit and start that race war, they’ve all been hankering for. Trust me, we wouldn’t. We’d be too busy building rope walkways between our houses.

Quite frankly, I don’t think our lives will be greatly upheaved. We all know our zombie lore, having completely memorized the Dawn of the Dead remake.

What not to do.

Also, Black men are some amazingly clever tinkers. My brother and his friends, will probably have the whole neighborhood hooked up with electricity and running water, using car batteries, electrical cords and duct tape in the space of a week. Plus, it’s just safer hanging out in our own neighborhood because there’s more than a few White people who are just itching to use a zombie apocalypse as an excuse to execute Black people. They’re too scared to come here, now. They’re not going out of their way to visit during the apocalypse. I’m sure they’ll be too busy.

The place to not be be during a zombie apocalypse is the suburbs. In the city: plenty of places to scavenge for medicine because it’s where all the pharmacies are, if you shop early. I don’t drink booze, but hey, liquor stores are  everywhere, although I suspect that’s the first place people will raid. Bottled water – check. Diapers – check. Formula – check. Neighbors who are trying to shoot you – probably not. And do you know how much non-perishable food there is in the city? At my place of work alone, there’s about ten vending machines, full of soda, chips, peanuts and those little Chef Boyardee microwavable cups, with the pull tabs.

A full banquet.

Also, some of us don’t have the luxury of “bugging out”. I have an elderly parent with a lot of medical issues. There’s no way I’m going to talk her into going out in the woods. I can’t even convince her to go outside when it gets below 50 degrees. Plus, she requires a small pharmacy just for her medical needs. Hell, I need diabetes medication and my glasses. What happens if I lose my glasses in the woods? I can’t even see to drive without them. I’m certainly not going to stumble around in the woods without them. Jeebus help you, if you have a physical disability or a mental illness more desperate than glasses. You better have a damn good group of friends to help you out. There’s a reason we don’t see people complaining about the arthritis in their knees. People suffering from arthritis are probably all dead.

Let’s be truthful. “Bugging out” is an activity reserved for fit, single, young, White, video game playing men, who dislike their families. Young men who are barely equipped to survive in the suburbs, with running water and microwave ovens. Young men who think they will find a hot woman and fall in love, when they can’t even attract a woman while theyre able to practice good hygiene. In other words, they think they’re Glenn from The Walking Dead, when  most such men are like Eugene. They will have to get other people to protect them. And they’d have to use lies and deception because they’re certainly not going to be able to use their charming personalities. Glenn is likable. They’re not. They’re the kind of people most people want to shoot after spending just five minutes alone with them.

It’s all well and good for someone like Michonne, a Black  woman, alone, wandering around in the woods chopping up zombies. She’s not even remotely concerned about being raped, taken hostage for some nutjob’s  harem, or shot for being Black during the apocalypse. She’s got skills. I harbor absolutely no illusions that I am Michonne. My vast knowledge of Samurai and Kung Fu movies is not going to be very helpful.

Not me!

Still not me.

Nope!

What the hell is this huge crowd of young men and their hot, but conveniently helpless girlfriends, going to be doing in the woods? My guess would be trying to look tough while carrying blunted Samurai swords they have no fucking clue how to use, and drawing the population of zombies out of the city. Those of us who couldn’t “bug out”, can get to rebuilding civilization, without being bothered by their macho silliness.

Either that or being victimized and killed by all of the other people, much tougher than them, who have watched the same zombie movies, but who actually know how to use a Samurai sword.  People who all decided to leave the city, thinking it would be safer.

With most of the population eaten, those of us with family members we actually love, will have to work it out for ourselves.

Is anybody writing a book for those of us who can’t Bug Out? This needs doing.

No?

I guess I better hop to it, then.

Books That need To Be Brought To A Screen Near Somebody

Octavia Butler –

 Actually just about anything by Octavia Butler could and should be filmed. I think  Clay’s Ark would make a wonderful television series about humanity in decline and being supplanted by a better, stronger race. Fledgling would be problematic to film. One of  its main themes is racism, and one of the greatest hurdles to film would be the youth of the protagonist and her social and feeding  arrangements.

 

The Cal Leandros Series By Rob Thurman

A series of books about the NY adventures of two brothers living among the city’s monsters, one of them a half human, half monster and the other a blond American Samurai, who are totally devoted to each other. This series has a lot of similarities to Supernatural but with slightly less angst and more ass kicking. The themes of child abuse and c0-dependent relationships could easily be explored here.

I would give my left nut to see Cal Leandros cussing and shooting his way across my TV. As for Robin Goodfellow, I simply cannot think of anyone who could do himcorrectly, but, as one of the oldest beings on Earth, I do like the idea of racebending the character to Asian or African.

 

The Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Peter Grant is a cop who stumbles onto a magical London during one of his cases. One of the standouts of this book is that the protagonist is a black man and many of the characters he meets, including the Queens of the various rivers of London are PoC, too. I picture Peter Capaldi as Nightingale. The first book would make an excellent mini-series or movie. I wouldn’t mind seeing this in animated form either.

 

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

I’ve always pictured Vin Diesel in the role of Sandman Slim. Of course I’m open to anyone who can play a bad ass, modern day, magic user who loves obscure horror movies and dates a spider-girl.

 

Elvis Cole/Joe Pike Series by Robert Crais

Like the series Justified, this would be great on TV. I have no idea who would portray Elvis Cole, but more importantly, you’d need someone who can play Joe Pike correctly. Joe is a fairly deep character and a man of few words. A lot of televisions creators wouldn’t be able to depict those two qualities very well, so it would largely depend on the talents of the actor.

 

The Hexslinger Series by Gemma Files

 

This is a real long shot and  would make a great movie but I can’t see this ever getting made by Hollywood. For one thing it features a non-tragic, gay character who starts off as a villain and becomes a hero by the end of the series. It would make a much better television show but I don’t see that getting made either as its a western  full of upended stereotypes.

 

 Territory by Emma Bull

This book is probably much easier to make a movie from. It features a magic slinging Wyatt Earp and other classic Western characters. Think Hell on Wheels, crossed with a Jim Butcher novel.

 

The Midnight Mayor Series by Kate Griffith

 

This is another book whose magic would be a little difficult to convey on screen as it does not allow for pretty lights coming  out of people’s hands. In this series, its the city itself, London,  that holds the magic, and practitioners can access it to do incredible things, like create monsters made of garbage, talk to the dragon that lives under the Thames or travel through  electrical wiring and neon signs..

 

The Sonja Blue Series by Nancy  Collins

This would make a great series on HBO. This is pretty dark and gritty series. The only comparison I could make, would be Blade as a young adult woman, only without all the martial skills he possesses. Since she doesn’t have any of those skills, her fighting would be a lot dirtier. Hey, they managed to make The Crow into a movie, why not this book?

 

Swan Song by Robert McCammon

If they can bring The Stand to television as a miniseries, then this can also be filmed. Think McCarthy’s The Road, with magic, bigger and crazier gangs of people, and shapeshifting demons.

 

The Bridge by John Skipp and Craig Spector

This is a horror  movie waiting to happen. It does not have a happy ending, however, so that is likely to be rewritten or scrapped altogether. Its got plenty of action and monsters, so there’d be lots of great reasons to have special effects.

 

 

The Light at the End by John Skipp and Craig Spector

This is quite possibly one of the most awesome vampire novels ever. So why will nobody film this? Instead we keep getting endless damn retreads of Insidious ripoffs. This book was written thirty  years ago, still holds up to scrutiny, and Hollywood has completely ignored it, in favor of giving us shit like the Transformers movies. Really?!!

Ahh well, there’s a metric buttload of books Hollywood could be making into movies and television shows, that we will never get to see. I guess we have no choice but to dream about them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geeking Out About: Mid-season Series, Maybe

Frankly, I think I have enough stuff to watch without being inundated with new shows this January. I think its very inconsiderate for television to air all these great shows, all at the same time, and in such a way that I don’t have any time to look at them, but that said, I am looking forward to some new stuff that I may or may not like.

I can’t promise anything, though. I’m going to use the same tactic as used this Fall. I’m going to start watching these shows and then weed out the ones that just don’t make the cut. But even if I don’t review them or even like them, I ‘m  still eager to try them out:

Shows like:

The Magicians:

This is one of the top shows I’m looking forward to this season. I loved the books, (I’m still reading the third book. The second book is okay but not  as good as the first) and the characters look not so different from how I imagined them. I don’t like that it looks sort of like a sexier version of a CW show, but the books are described as Harry Potter with sex and drugs.

 

 

The Expanse:

I’m a big fan of Thomas Jane, and this looks like an outer space, noir, mystery mashup  thing I would like. It s probably a little more  Dashell Hammett in Space than Outland.

 

Childhood’s End:

Nope! I never read the book, nor do I have the urge to read it now. I know a little bit about it because scfi fans keep talking about how wonderful it is, but I’m interested strictly in the show. Now that its actually a series, I don’t want to spoil all my questions by reading the books. Its really nice to see the SYFY channel start actually trying to be a science fiction network  after having gone so wrong, in the past.

 

 

Rush Hour:

I really really want to like this because I liked the movies but the actor they have here only reminds me that he’s not Chris Tucker. He’s just not  funny. Also, there might be some racist yellow peril and Asian sexism in here, that I can’t abide. I don’t see this show being much of a rival for Into the Badlands.

 

 

Damien:

I can watch just about anything with angels and demons in it and I’m a big fan of the original movies, so this is right up my alley. I’m looking for a certain amount of depth from this one.

 

 

Legends of Tomorrow:

This just looks like fun. Good mindless fun. This will probably be playing in the background while I do other stuff.

 

 

The X-Files:

I was a fan of the original but I don’t expect the dynamic of the old show to reassert itself, but it is nice to see this show make a comeback.

Agent Carter:

I lost interest in this show about four or five episodes into the season. Its not a bad show, it just wasn’t compelling enough to hold my attention in a sea of other, better shows. I really like the idea of a female led show but it made my shit list when it had no WoC in it in NY city (which had a massive population of PoC, during that time period), and the fandom got on my last nerve with BS about how WoC need to wait their turn while White women get theirs. (These are people who need to learn the definition of the term intersectionality.)

I’m hoping the show does better on the diversity front now that it has moved to LA, but I’m not holding my breath, and no, I still don’t want anything to do with the fans of this show.

 

There will also  be the staple shows like Supernatural, Sleepy Hollow, American Horror Story, and The Walking Dead.

I know I haven’t been doing any Sleepy Hollow recaps but I just have not the time. I haven’t stopped watching it or liking it, though.

Coming Soon: Ash Vs. The Evil Dead Review, some more movies, and a Jessica Jones Overview.

Hopefully I can get some Meta Essays out for Hannibal, George Miller’s Feminist credentials, and Tropic Thunder (although that one is a long shot. I haven’t even started it yet), during the hiatus.

So many promises, so little time.

This should be like Field of Dreams. if I write it, y’all  will show up and read’em. Right?